


Take My Hand, Pull Me from the Dark

by MountainAtMyGates



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Boys Kissing, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fix-It, Idiots in Love, M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Old Married Couple, Oral Sex, Past Torture, Road Trips, Slow Burn, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:41:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23990968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainAtMyGates/pseuds/MountainAtMyGates
Summary: “What? I told you it wasn’t exactly a fairytale, pal,” he said grimly and Bucky shook his head, lips pressed tightly together in a furious line.“You left him, Steve, you asshole! Don’t you think he needs you more than I do? Goddamn it if he survived all that and found his way back to you, don’t you think I’d be tough enough to manage the same? And no, it don’t exactly sound like a fuckin' picnic but surely he needs your help to get over that shit more than I do to avoid it?” Bucky demanded; his voice coming out all Brooklyn and fiery rage like Steve hadn’t heard for years. Steve looked at him incredulously for a few moments; it hadn’t been the reaction he’d expected but really he knew Bucky was right.As soon as this Bucky was somewhere safe Steve needed to find a way back to his own.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 34
Kudos: 88





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!
> 
> I'm new to this site and still figuring things out, so please excuse anything weird with formatting etc whilst I work out what the heck I'm doing here. 
> 
> Endgame made me mad. It made me SO MAD and I am SO SALTY about it I've decided to write a fix-it, it's all I can do at this point because let's be honest here... fuck that ending. This was originally meant to be a single piece around 10,000 words in length. I have three parts completed so far which total over 20,000 words already so it's a bit bigger than I planned! I'll update once a week at least to give me time to write ahead.  
> I don't have a beta-reader so all mistakes are my own, and I know i'm not a great writer but I just couldn't see Steve's character get so badly betrayed by shitty writing like that, so I know my writing will at least be better than their ending :) 
> 
> Anyways I hope you guys enjoy, the tags and rating will update as I go I guess (let's be honest, it's probably going to end up E-rated) and please feel free to leave comments/constructive feedback

Bucky blinked and rolled over onto his back. He quickly sat up and glanced around at his surroundings. When had he ended up on the ground?

“Steve?” he called out again, having called for him once only a moment ago as a very strange feeling swept through him.

He crawled forward a little, hands searching for the gun he was certain had just been in his hands a second ago but now couldn’t be found anywhere.

“Steve!” he called, louder now as he stood up and looked around.

Wanda appeared beside him, looking around too, appearing to be just as confused as he felt. In his periphery he could see others, but notably not Steve, and not Thor. He was also aware of an unsettling quiet, the sounds of the battle no longer present in the distance.

“Where’s Steve?” he asked her and she shook her head.

“He was right there, I saw him too just a few moments ago,” she pointed to the spot where Bucky was certain Steve had just been standing.

Bucky’s eyes scanned their immediate surroundings again. T’Challa was approaching them, striding purposefully, and overhead Sam was scanning the area.

“They are… all gone,” T’Challa said flatly as he reached where Bucky and Wanda were stood. In his panic of looking for Steve Bucky hadn’t even realised that the _things_ they had been fighting had all vanished.

“What the hell?” Bucky asked to nobody in particular.

A figure sprinting towards them caught their attention.

“Okoye? What… what is happening here?” T’Challa asked her as she reached them.

“It has been – five years,” she panted, uncharacteristically reaching out to clutch at T’Challa’s shoulder desperately, as if needing to prove to herself that he was real.

“What?” he asked her. “You are confused, you must be-“ he started and she cut him off, speaking much more firmly.

“It has been _five years._ You were gone. You were all gone,” she repeated, looking around between them all. Sam landed gracefully, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, and walked over to them, looking just as confused as they all were.

“There’s nothing here, no trace of the battle,” Sam confirmed and Bucky frowned, glancing at T’Challa who caught his eye and held his gaze.

A swirling of golden sparks behind Sam caught all of their attention. The swirl started small and then grew larger and larger until it was large enough that a man swept through it wearing a long cloak.

“It’s been five years, they need us. Get everybody that you can. I’ll come back for you when it’s time, but we don’t have long,” he spoke quickly and with a familiar New York twang that Bucky picked up on immediately.

And then he was gone. He swept back through the swirling gold and it closed behind him.

“Dramatic much?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow at the spot where the golden circle had appeared and then disappeared.

“He is not lying. It has been five years, and if what I think is happening is happening now, then they do need us. The Captain needs us,” Okoye spoke firmly, her eyes locking uncomfortably onto Bucky now. He decidedly did _not_ squirm under her withering gaze.

“Get everybody that you can,” T’Challa instructed her quickly and she nodded, peeling off again in the direction of the edge of the city.

“Why do I feel like something really weird is going on here?” Sam asked.

“Because it is,” Wanda responded, pointing behind them as the golden circle started to appear again.

***

Steve was leaving.

Bucky was _sure_ of it.

His gut feeling was telling him that Steve was going to take these stones back to their rightful places and use his one way trip home to go further into the past instead, and to stay there. Steve’s body language seemed to back his theory up. The way he moved towards the platform, barely meeting anyone’s eye, determined in his mission, set in his decision.

His decision to leave. To leave Bucky alone in an unfamiliar future.

His hands clenched and unclenched repeatedly as he worked to swallow the painful knot in his throat and keep his outward body language calm.

“Remember,” Bruce’s voice as he spoke to Steve jolted Bucky out of his rapidly spiralling anxious thoughts. “You have to return the stones to the exact moment you got ‘em or you’re gonna open up a bunch of nasty alternate realities,” he explained to Steve who seemed… subdued, maybe even downcast.

“Don’t worry Bruce, clip all the branches,” Steve agreed, closing the case and keeping his eyes down.

“You know I tried-“ Bruce begins and then pauses briefly, faltering.

“When I had the stones – the gauntlet – I really tried to bring her back,” he says softly, avoiding Steve’s eye before finally looking up at him. “I miss her man,” he adds finally.

“Me too,” Steve says with a solemn nod. Bucky knows it’s the truth. These past few days have been a blur since he emerged from _wherever_ he had been for the last five years and into the midst of the final battle. He knows Steve misses Natasha. He’s awkwardly held Steve in his arms whilst he’s cried silent tears for her in these last few days. He knows. He misses her too, even though he still isn’t sure if she ever really trusted him.

He knows that Steve misses Tony too. Bucky had done his best to avoid everything surrounding Tony’s death, a fresh wave of Winter Soldier guilt rising over Howard and Maria and now little Morgan that it felt almost disrespectful for him to feel sad for the loss of Tony. But he did. Not as much as Steve, but he did. The morning of Tony’s funeral Steve had ended up damn near dragging him out of the house to attend.

“C’mon Steve, I don’t even have a suit,” he’d protested weakly as Steve rummaged through all of his clothing until he located a reasonably smart all black ensemble for him, throwing it at him with an unreadable emotion in his eyes.

“Please, Buck?” he’d asked softly. Bucky held his gaze for a painful few seconds before nodding and picking up the clothing to go and change. He’d gone, preferring to stand way in the back with Sam and Wanda, letting Steve move forwards to pay his respects. Bucky felt like he had no place being there at all, but Steve wanted him there so he did it for him. When a silent tear had rolled down Bucky’s cheek as they stood assembled beside the lake Sam had stepped closer and put a comforting arm around him. Neither of them had commented on it.

Sam and Steve start to walk towards him now and Bucky forces himself into a more casual stance, shifting his weight more onto one leg and stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“You know if you want I could come with you,” Sam offers.

_Don’t leave me too Sam, I think we’re almost friends_ a desperate part of Bucky’s brain offers before he quietens it.

Steve gives him a small smile when he responds.

“You’re a good man Sam. This one’s on me though,” he says firmly but kindly, letting the other man know there is no room for discussion here. Steve will be going and he’ll be going alone. _And never to return_ offers that same voice in Bucky’s mind.

He looks up at Steve now; he has to as he draws closer.

For the first time in a while he feels afraid. He feels small and defenceless, he wants to hide and he just wants it to just be over. Get the pain out of the way.

Rip off the band-aid. Plunge into the cold water all at once.

If Steve is going and he isn’t coming back then he wants him gone now.

Steve stops in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch if Bucky could only make himself do it but he knows he can’t. Steve’s face perks up in a half-smile as he looks at him.

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back,” he offers and Bucky feels like he’s been punched in the gut. His face contorts in a weak imitation of Steve’s expression as he forces it to, his heart thudding against his ribs as the half-smile fails to reach his eyes. He swallows dryly again and shakes his head a little bit, the lump in his throat unbearable now.

“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you,” he forces out in response, his voice faltering as he does. He can feel it now, honest to god _tears_ are burning in his eyes and he needs Steve to just go so he doesn’t see. So he doesn’t know.

Steve sets his jaw and steps forward, his arm coming around his friend, Bucky responds automatically, bringing his own arm up to round Steve’s back in return, burying his face into his shoulder as much as he dares.

For the last time.

The sides of their faces just brush, and the temptation roars in his mind to just turn his head, just once, just touch his lips to Steve’s just to see what it feels like just for _one_ second. He fights it down and steps back, out of Steve’s space, glancing at the floor and trying to steel himself so he can say something, _anything_ , to even begin to say goodbye to Steve, to tell him what he means to him, what he has always meant to him.

“I’m gonna miss you buddy,” he forces out, barely above a whisper, barely holding back his emotions and panic and the tide of _grief_ already rising rapidly inside his mind because he know- he _knows_ that this is it for them.

At long last, it’s the end of the line.

He knows it’s not enough; it’s not good enough to only manage to say those sparse few words after everything Steve has done for him, after everything they’ve been through together. He can hardly sum up their friendship in five words, but they’re the only five words that come to him.

Their eyes meet, that unreadable emotion glinting again in Steve’s as he sets his jaw, and then finally responds.

“It’s gonna be okay, Buck.”

What must only be a second feels like an eternity to Bucky as their eyes remain locked before Steve turns away and walks onto the platform, activating his suit and picking up Mjolnir.

“Alright we’ll meet you back here Cap, you ready?” Bruce asks and Steve looks at Bucky, meeting his eyes again.

“You bet,” he says resolutely. To Bucky it sounded like goodbye.

Banner made the countdown.

Bucky barely heard him.

He watched Steve vanish into thin air, as if he was never there at all.

The gnawing emptiness growing rapidly inside him explodes in intensity and he feels sick. He feels wretched. He fights it. _Don’t have a panic attack now. You’re stronger than this. You’re a soldier. You can keep this inside you until you can get alone and break down in private but not here._

He steels himself as Banner counts back down, from five. Just five seconds and Steve would be back.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Steve was not back.

“I don’t know what happened, he blew right past his time stamp!” he heard Bruce say, panic in his tone.

Bucky takes a deep breath and turns his back to them, looking down at the ground, knowing full well that Steve isn’t going to reappear on that platform no matter which combination of buttons Banner hits. He looks towards the lake and freezes.

“Get him the hell back! Now!” Sam is verging on yelling. Banner is tinkering with the machine, trying to get the machine to spit Steve back out onto the platform.

Bucky wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The man sitting on the bench looking out over the lake certainly hadn’t been there before. Their location was very isolated, the nearest town over an hour away by car. He squinted, trying to see more clearly, before realising with cold dread that he knew that man. The set of his shoulders as he sat; the proud poise of his head on his neck.

That man was Steve.

“Sam,” he interrupted Sam still trying to talk to Bruce, still trying to work out how to get Steve back.

A few footsteps crunched through the grass as Sam approached Bucky, standing alongside him as they both looked at the man. By silent agreement they approached him together until they drew close enough that Bucky was certain that it _was_ Steve and he couldn’t do this – _he couldn’t -_ so he beckoned for Sam to go ahead, stopping a few metres short of the bench and trying not to hyperventilate.

Sam approached cautiously.

“Cap?” he offered, looking carefully at the man before him. He was certainly Steve Rogers, but he was much older than when he had seen him just a few seconds previously.

“Hi Sam,” he responded, his voice weakened by age.

Bucky felt his control shatter at the sound of Steve’s voice. He sounded so different, so frail. He felt like his heart was in his throat, tears burned at his eyes and his lungs felt too small.

Steve turned his head to look up at Sam and Bucky could see him in profile now, his face weathered and wrinkled. He looked at the floor again.

“So did something go wrong, or did something go right?” Sam asked, emotion creeping into his tone.

Steve glanced back at Bucky and gave a faint smile.

“Well, after he put the stones back I thought maybe I’ll try some of that life Tony was telling him to get,” Steve explained, speaking fondly.

Sam glanced back at Bucky in time to watch him swiftly wiping the single tear on his face away with his hand before stuffing it back in his pocket.

If Sam noticed the odd turn of phrase he didn’t comment. The gears in Bucky’s mind whirred. Why would Steve refer to himself in the third person?

“How’d that work out for you?” Sam asked and Steve was silent for a moment before answering, re-folding his hands in his lap as he spoke.

“It was beautiful,” he answered softly with a nod.

Sam spotted the wedding band on Steve’s hand and inclined his head.

“So, you want to tell me about her?” he asked with a smirk.

There was a silence, a few seconds where Bucky’s ears strained, waiting for the words he knew were coming. _I decided to stay with Peggy Carter. I loved her all my life._

“No. No I don’t think I will,” Steve responded with a wry smile and a glance backwards towards Bucky, but not meeting his eye.

“ _He_ can tell you himself,” Steve said in a fond yet begrudging sort of way.

The hairs on the back of Bucky’s neck stood up as he sensed someone else approaching from behind him, footsteps far too soft to be Banner.

“Y’didn’t tell ‘em about me did ya?” came a somewhat familiar voice from behind them. Bucky turned around so fast he almost fell over.

Walking towards them with the help of a well-worn wooden cane was none other than _himself_. He looked to be the same sort of age as Steve; his hair thinning and grey, his face wrinkled but eyes sparkling with a mischievous grin firmly set on his lips.

“No, Buck, I didn’t tell ‘em anything,” Steve grumbled as the older man approached Bucky.

“God, to be young again,” older Bucky sighed as he stopped just before his younger counterpart. Bucky felt like his eyes must be popping out of his head. He was certain that his heart must be pounding so loudly that the others must be able to hear it. “But you need a haircut son,” he said fondly, reaching out and ruffling Bucky’s long tresses.

So many questions raced through his mind as he just looked at his older self – dumbfounded. Emotions swirled, ones which he’d spent such a long time not being allowed that he didn’t quite know what to do with. He recognised them objectively though and amongst the swirling mixture he could pick out two that were distinctly stronger than the others.

First was anger. Steve had _left_ him alone here in the future to go back and seemingly live out his life with a different version of him? A version that wasn’t broken, or a risk to be around still, despite the deprogramming he wasn’t sure how much he fully trusted himself just yet.

Second was sadness, for much the same reasons. They were finally free now, Bucky from Hydra and the programming, and Steve from the weight of the world on his shoulders – Thanos was gone, everyone snapped away had been returned, Steve could rest for a while now and they could maybe spend some time together at last, but instead Steve had chosen to abandon him? Go back instead and live with this unsullied version?

The thoughts swirled again, bringing him back to anger and confusion. Hiding his emotions and displaying outwardly nothing more than a subtle clenching of his vibranium fist he looked at the older version of himself stood before him again.

“Heh, well Steve was right, poor kid doesn’t know what the hell to do!” his counterpart laughed, Steve chuckling on the bench.

“H-how? What? What the hell?” Bucky finally breathed, mentally kicking himself for not being able to ask a more eloquent question.

“We can explain,” older Bucky answered cheerfully, offering his hand to his younger self to shake, his right hand. Looking down Bucky could see that the left hand supporting his weight on the walking cane wasn’t the original flesh and blood arm, but wasn’t the metal arm fitted on him by Hydra nor the vibranium model given to him by T’Challa.

He shook his own hand, still feeling like he was at imminent risk of some kind of coronary failure and still fighting to keep his emotional response to this situation buried where it couldn’t be seen, and then followed the older man towards the bench.

“Quit hoggin’ all the seat you old punk,” older Bucky groused and Steve grumbled, shifting up a little to make space beside him.

Bucky caught Sam’s eye for a moment and shrugged as the words ‘what the fuck’ were mouthed silently to him.

“Sam, I misled you just now, I’m sorry. I’m not who you think I am,” Steve said solemnly and Sam shook his head.

“I don’t understand. You are Steve Rogers, right?” he asked and Steve nodded.

“Yes, I am. But I’m not the Steve Rogers that you know,” he said before pausing, allowing Bucky and Sam another incredulous glance at each other. A tiny sprout of hope began to bloom in Bucky’s chest.

“Is he alive?” Bucky blurted out before he could stop himself.

“Don’t rush the man, he’ll get there,” his older self scolded him and Sam nudged him in the ribs, smirking. If the situation hadn’t been so utterly bizarre Bucky might have even laughed, but he needed answers, he needed to know what the _hell_ was going on here.

“Your Steve Rogers returned in time from today to return the six stones to the places and times they were taken from. He was successful in doing this,” Steve starts, looking between Bucky and Sam as he speaks.

“When he’d returned all the stones he used his last trip to jump back to 1945 with me. He couldn’t leave me in my timeline after he implied I was a Hydra agent in order to get the Sceptre in 2012,” Steve explained and Bucky’s mind raced faster, trying to work out where this was going.

If this wasn’t _his_ Steve sitting in front of him then his Steve could still come back, couldn’t he? He risked a glance back towards the platform, seeing it was still empty and Bruce was still working at the console.

“And then what?” Bucky asked and his older self nodded.

“It turned out that the idea of any form of Bucky Barnes being tortured by Hydra is so unacceptable to any form of Steve Rogers that this asshole-” Bucky jostled the man sat beside him with his shoulder “-and your version of this asshole messed with time and pulled my sorry ass out of the snow the day I fell from the train in Azzano,” older Bucky explained, speaking more quickly than Steve.

“ _Buck_ ,” Steve sighed exasperatedly, one hand coming up to grip his forehead between his eyes.

Something clicks in Bucky’s mind.

“Wait so you… you were never? You didn’t… you never?” he stammers and his older self nods understandingly.

“I was never captured by Hydra and never became who you would call The Winter Soldier,” he confirms. Sam lets out a low whistle beside him.

“Damn, don’t let Bruce find out about how much you’ve screwed up time,” Sam warned. “I mean. Not that I’m not happy you avoided seventy years of torture or anything!” he added quickly as Bucky narrowed his eyes at him.

“Your Steve used his last jump on his time travel device to go back so we could save this Bucky from that,” Steve explained carefully, clapping his version of Bucky on the shoulder.

“And what happened to the Steve from this timeline then? Where is he now?” Bucky asked quickly, mouth dry and palm sweating as he waited for the answer. The tiny sprout of hope was now a full-fledged sapling with leaves, reaching hungrily for the sun above it, desperate for more light and nutrients.

“He’s in our garage,” older Bucky answered with a grin and Steve gave him a semi-serious semi-playful slap on the thigh.

“Wasn’t going to _tell_ him that yet,” he grumbled and older Bucky sniggered. “Once he was absolutely certain we were going to be okay and once we’d got me healthy again after falling off the train, we launched a mission to storm Hydra’s last known base and steal their chryo -chamber. The one I guess would have eventually been for me, had things played out the same.”

“And Steve’s in the chryo-chamber, now? The same Steve who just left here? 2023 Steve?” Bucky asked. It still was a leap in his mind to think that five years had gone by. He hadn’t had the chance really to sit down with Steve, to talk to him about what he’d been through during those five years when everyone had been vanished. For him it had only been a few days since he had walked outside and greeted Steve and his team on the steps of T’Challa’s grand residence, and Steve had been oddly reserved and quiet the whole time.

“In our garage. With some of last year’s Rhubarb crop in there with him too, I think, couldn’t fit it in the freezer but I wanted it to maybe make a pie at some point,” older Bucky chuckled again and Steve rolled his eyes and shoved his shoulder.

Bucky and Sam were silent for a few long moments before Sam finally spoke.

“My head hurts,” he said shortly, looking at Bucky who nodded, pressing his hand to his own forehead.

“Yeah. Seriously what the _hell_ ,” he breathed, walking away a few steps and starting to pace.

If his Steve had gone back to save this Bucky, how did that leave the events of the world? What about the people the Winter Soldier killed or the people Captain America had saved after 2012? The Triskelion and the fall of Hydra and in turn SHIELD? Ultron? Everything that followed?

“I’m… my head hurts,” he repeated Sam’s words and Steve nodded.

“I can understand it must be a lot. Would you like to come with us to wake up your Steve? He hasn’t been out for gosh… must be well over ten years now, because he didn’t want to age. He told us not to disturb him unless it was absolutely necessary or we’d got you, so, I guess this counts as both of those,” he offered with a kind smile.

Bucky looked at Sam who raised his hands as if in surrender.

“Don’t look at me man. I don’t understand this any better than you.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” Bucky sighed in response, looking at the two men before him as they began to bicker between themselves again.

“I drove most of the way here, you can drive back!”

“C’mon Steve, my leg hurts, feels like rain’s comin’. Can’t you drive just the first part?” older Bucky wheedled, Steve rolling his eyes.

“Don’t give me the leg excuse Bu-“

“Where did you guys settle? Where’s home for you? New York?” Sam asked, pointedly breaking up the bickering.

“We set up home in Brooklyn,” older Bucky deadpans and Sam looks surprised, Bucky himself can feel surprise creeping onto his features. People would surely have recognised them around their old neighbourhood? If he was meant to be dead and Steve was meant to be dead that surely would have caused some issues with their cover.

“Brooklyn, _Iowa_ ,” Steve corrects and older Bucky looks disappointed.

“Damn it Stevie you’re killin’ all my fun! I was gonna see how long I could have ‘em goin’,” he complained, winking to his younger counterpart in a way that said _‘yes, all versions of Bucky Barnes in all timelines and universes exist solely to get on the very last nerve of all Steve Rogers’_.

“Iowa?” Sam asks.

“Oh y’know, I just love corn. And trains. And endless straight sections of road,” older Bucky said seriously, nodding along until Steve gave him a gentle punch in the shoulder.

“Ow! Watch it punk! Alright, truth is we almost blew our cover so many times they put us somewhere remote,” he grumbled, raising his prosthetic hand to rub his right shoulder where Steve had just punched it. Bucky looked at it as subtly as he could, subconsciously flexing his own left hand.

“You can get a good look at it on the road,” his older counterpart smiled at him, spotting him looking right away.

“I- I’m coming with you…?” Bucky said uncertainly, it came out as somewhere half between a question and a statement.

“Well, we’ve got two-hundred-twenty pounds of frozen hunk that needs to be collected, and someone’s gotta sign for that package,” older Bucky grinned with a wink and Steve looked scandalised.

“How many times I gotta tell ya Buck, don’t objectify the younger me,” he protested and his Bucky chuckled.

“Oh settle down, you know you’re the only Steve Rogers for me,” he said mock-apologetically, leaning across and planting a swift kiss at the corner of his lips.

Bucky could feel his face burning and Sam’s eyes boring into the side of his head. He refused to look at him.

“So when are you guys going to get on the road?” Sam asked.

“Well, we can leave whenever. We got here a couple of days ago to make sure we didn’t miss it. Your Steve was pretty insistent that we didn’t miss it, wrote us out a few reminders of the date, so we wanted to make sure we didn’t get held up by anything. We stayed in a cabin a couple miles from here. The car is just that way, out of sight,” older Bucky pointed towards the direction he’d come from.

“You’re coming too right?” Bucky asked Sam, turning to him.

“No man,” he said with a growing smirk and a hearty wink. “I think this one is just for you and Steve.”

“Nothing… nothing like that ever happened Sam, I swear,” Bucky responded quickly and Sam raised his hands again as if in surrender.

“If it did it did, and if it didn’t yet I think this right here-” he gestured between the older Bucky and Steve “-means it’s probably _gonna_. This isn’t nineteen-forty-five anymore man, you’re not gonna get shot or shipped home on a dishonourable discharge, you do you,” he responded with a grin before backtracking slightly. “Well… I mean that sounds kinda weird because there’s two of you here. So don’t literally you _do_ you, that would be so wrong on so many levels and I’m just gonna stop talking,” he trailed off as older Bucky burst into fits of laughter.

“You go do your Steve. Our Steve. The Steve from the correct time. Go find him, and do him,” Sam said firmly and Bucky felt his face grow hot.

“Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you, Wilson,” he threatened emptily, trying his best to narrow his eyes and look menacing.

“Of course man, would never suggest otherwise,” he said with a knowing smile.

“Before we go Sam, come with us to the car? I’ve got something for you there,” Steve said fondly and Sam raised an eyebrow.

“For me? Now don’t get me wrong Steve but surely you never knew Sam Wilson where you’re from?” he asked suspiciously and Bucky’s brain clicked. Of course this Steve never knew Sam. He never met him running that morning in 2013 like Steve had told him the story of about a hundred times, always smirking at the sour expression on Sam’s face as he quoted ‘ _on your left’_ to the point where everyone in the vicinity wanted to punch him.

“Oh no?” Steve responded with a widening smirk as he fished his wallet out of his pocket. He opened it and removed a dog-eared photo, passing it to Sam whose eyes widened in shock.

“No way. No freaking way.”

Bucky leaned over to glance at the photo and breathed a chuckle. The photograph showed a young Sam of maybe five years old, stood between Steve and Bucky, looking around thirty years younger than they currently were.

“What’s the matter Wilson? You forget your Uncles?” older Bucky asked, all Brooklyn twang and widening smirk as Sam looked horrified.

“Why don’t I _remember_ this?!” he demanded.

“Because your altered past doesn’t become your present,” came Bruce’s voice. He’d obviously approached them quietly as they’d all been distracted with their conversation.

“What did he do?” Bruce asked, pinching the bridge of his nose in extreme exasperation.

“I’m hungry. Can we do this over lunch?” asked older Bucky, mischief glinting in his eyes.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's part 2, I think there'll be 5 altogether but I will update this if it changes.
> 
> Content/trigger warnings for this chapter: there's an extremely brief moment that could be considered suicidal ideation from Steve near the start of the chapter, and towards the end of the chapter there's some mention of gore.
> 
> Again, not beta-read so all mistakes are my own, please feel free to yell at me about them :)

*~*~*~* 1945 – Azzano, Italian Alps*~*~*~*~*

Steve shivered against the cold. He’d let his beard re-grow during the time he’d been returning the stones and he was grateful for it now, feeling like without it his face would be really taking the brunt of the driving icy wind.

He’s sure he never used to feel the cold this intensely, at least not since the serum, but recently he hadn’t felt the same. Since the battle with Thanos and everything that followed, he hasn’t felt quite right, quite up to his full strength.

He’d been back in 1945 for almost a week, lying low in an abandoned farmhouse in the vicinity of where he knew too well Bucky was going to fall from the train. He was tired. It had taken him a couple of months all told to get all the stones back to the right places and times and it had been exhausting, not just physically but emotionally.

He’d seen Tony. He’d posed as himself from a previous time and had interacted with him, talked to him as if nothing was wrong, nothing was about to happen. It had been so awful not to be able to use that opportunity to say something, to make peace properly and tell him that he was so sorry. Sorry for everything that happened with the Sokovia Accords. Sorry for everything that happened with Bucky, his parents, keeping it from him even though he still stood by that it was the right thing to do, he was sorry for the hurt it had caused. And mostly that he was sorry that he wouldn’t get to live out the rest of his life with Morgan and Pepper, sorry that he would never get to enjoy the safe world he had sacrificed himself to give the rest of them.

He’d also seen Natasha.

He’d watched her and Clint from afar on Vormir as they fought fiercely, both determined to be the one who made the sacrifice for the stone. A desperate part of his brain urged him to crawl out of his hiding spot and separate them, throw himself off the rock instead, granting them the stone and himself peace.

Instead he’d remained still with silent tears rolling down his face as he watched the two of them careen over the edge, Clint hauling himself back up what felt like an eternity later. He’d stayed on his knees breathing heavily for a long few moments, his head down and silent sobs shaking his shoulders. Steve longed to reach out and comfort him, wrap him in his arms and tell him this would all be okay in the end; that he would have his family back and it’s what Natasha would have wanted for him. It hurts him so much that he can’t. He watches instead as Clint gets himself so worked up that he ends up vomiting in the dirt. He remains down on his knees for a long few seconds afterwards before the sky parts and Clint seemingly vanishes, appearing far below with the stone in his hand. The second that Clint is out of sight Steve springs into action, returning the stone and demanding the Red Skull returns Natasha alive.

A soul for a soul, but the deal cannot be undone.

Steve waits to be certain that Clint has left before he traipses back down from the opposing rock formation to Natasha’s body. He can do very little for her in the way of the type of send-off that she deserves. He kneels beside her for a long time and tries to come up with some sort of plan. Could he return her to the future somehow? Take her back so she can have a real funeral? Or could he return her to the future, find Doctor Strange and borrow the freshly returned time stone to somehow turn this back? Bring her back to life somehow?

All of his pondering yields him no viable answers so eventually he lowers his head for a moment and closes his eyes, gathering his strength for what he knows he must do. He does what he can and finds a suitable location with a view over the strangely beautiful yet absolutely desolate landscape and digs her grave with his bare hands, digging until he is soaked in sweat and tears and the gritty soil rips at his skin and makes his fingertips bleed.

Finally when he’s finished, Steve returns to the body of his friend and lifts her as gently as he possibly can, carrying her slowly to the grave he has dug. He closes her eyes and places a kiss on her forehead, sweeping back a few strands of her hair and holding her a little while longer.

“Thank you, for everything,” he’d whispered as he carefully set her down.

His tears begin to flow freely again as he works to bury her. He forages around for some larger rocks and places them around the grave site, using a few to form an ‘N’. Not wanting her to be alone he sleeps fitfully curled on his side next to her that night, or what he believes to be night on the strange planet, completely exposed to the elements on the alien world and talking to his friend for the last time in between short bouts of restless sleep.

He leaves at last with a heavy heart and two stones left to return, setting the device at his wrist as he heads for New York in 2012.

When he arrives he makes the decision to return the Mind Stone first so that he can bring his 2012 self with him when he returns the time stone and speak to The Ancient One so he can clarify how much damage he would be doing to time if he was to do what he intended to do with his very last jump.

He felt awfully guilty about how he’d obtained the Sceptre and the trouble he’d caused for his 2012 self. Not only had he implied to an elevator full of Hydra agents that he was one of them, without warning his 2012 self of this, he’d also told him Bucky was alive with no context or further information. Hell, Steve didn’t even know where Bucky _was_ in 2012, likely frozen somewhere in some god-forsaken Hydra hellhole like the Siberian facility he had once seen when they had pursued Zemo.

He’d made his decision there standing in the clearing that day with Bruce, Sam and Bucky. He needed to make things right for this Steve in this timeline, and he hoped in doing so he could also make things right for another version of Bucky. Once he’d done those things, and only then, could he go home.

The thought of it stirs so many emotions in him that his eyes fill again. He has a chance to save Bucky from everything that he’s had to go through. He can never rid himself of the memories, or his Bucky of the memories, but he can save another version of them from ever having to experience it which is as close as he can get.

After losing track of Bucky in 2014 after the fall of the helicarriers he’d spent many nights staring at whatever ceiling he happened to be beneath remembering in agonising detail the terrified expression on Bucky’s face when he had his moments of clarity, when he was _Bucky_ and not the Winter Solider, when he was realising what was happening and who he was. He’d cried alone in the dark for his friend. He’d cried a few times in front of Sam. Sam was such a good friend to him. His patience was limitless when it came to listening to people talk about their pain or their trauma, and even if he didn’t trust Bucky when they did manage to get him back he knew that Sam trusted Bucky now where he’d left them, and that meant so much to him that it damn near made him tear up again.

He knew that if for some reason - for any reason - he didn’t make it back to 2023, Bucky would be safe with Sam and although he could never get rid of the memories for himself or _his_ Bucky, he could protect _a_ version of Bucky from it, and that was good enough for him.

*

Returning the mind stone wasn’t as comparatively easy as some of the others had been. It was encased within Loki’s sceptre which he no longer had, so he’d had to form a new plan to get it back into the hands of the chronologically correct keepers, much as it pained him to know he was handing the stone over to Hydra.

He had split the two remaining stones up into two cases, earlier hiding the time stone in a safe location and bringing only what he needed to Stark Tower.

“JARVIS, what’s the location of Jasper Sitwell?” he asked the building as he lurked in a corner of the lower level parking garage. There was a pause and Steve begged mentally for JARVIS to respond to him. Part of him was concerned that with his level of intelligence, JARVIS would ignore his request if he believed him to be an imposter. He was hoping that because he genuinely _was_ Steve Rogers that it would be enough to pass JARVIS’ security protocols.

“Agent Sitwell is in the North-side elevator which is currently descending,” JARVIS responded, even for a non-sentient being he sounded suspicious. Steve was aware that was probably because JARVIS would be detecting that he was the _third_ Steve Rogers in the building at this current moment, not to mention that the AI would have been aware of the duplication of Tony inside the tower too.

“Could you hold that elevator for me? Say the fourth floor?” Steve asked as he broke into a run towards the nearest stairwell and pushed open the door, heading upwards three steps at a time.

“Certainly Captain,” the empty stairwell answered crisply.

Steve reached the fourth floor and headed for the elevator on the North side of the building. He only had to wait a few seconds before the doors pinged and opened.

“What’s the matter Cap, you need something else?” Rumlow asked as he saw Steve standing there, having only seen him moments ago disembarking the same elevator on the fourteenth floor.

“Been called back out urgently, a section of the subway collapsed and they need all hands to dig for survivors. Take this back would you?” he said quickly, not allowing Rumlow or anyone else the chance to interrupt as he thrust the case into Sitwell’s arms, who accepted it on instinct, if he noticed it was a different, smaller case, he didn’t have time to mention it as Steve jabbed the button for the lobby and exited the elevator as fast as possible, setting off back towards the stairwell at a run and not daring to look back as he headed for his next destination within the building, the third floor atrium.

2012 Steve Rogers had been, understandably, not exactly happy to see 2023 Steve waiting there when he woke up after being put under by the touch of the Sceptre. He also wasn’t very happy that he’d been dragged into a side-room so nobody else would find them there.

“What-Loki? Stop!” he’d blurted out the second he’d come to with 2023 Steve kneeling over him still, just setting him down after bringing him out of the public area.

“I’m still not Loki. I can tell you what’s going on here but you need to trust me,” Steve urged in a calming tone. Distrust and anger were brimming in the familiar blue eyes before him but Steve held his ground.

“I’ll tell you everything, just don’t attack me and don’t call for backup and bring anyone else here. I can’t be seen,” he added quickly.

The man on the ground, Rogers from 2012, narrowed his eyes at him before ripping the cowl off his head and tossing it aside, sitting up and scooting back from Steve a little way, putting some space between them.

“You’ve got ten seconds to convince me I want to hear what you’ve got to say before I ask JARVIS to send the rest of the team in here,” he ground out and Steve nodded.

“I’m you from the future. I’m from 2023. Bucky _is_ alive and he’s there too, but I think I can get you back to 1945 and prevent him from ever being lost in the first place, we can save him if you just trust me,” he said sincerely and Rogers looked suspiciously at him.

“Tell me something that Loki wouldn’t know, if you’re really me, tell me something to prove it,” he demanded with a sharp edge to his tone and Steve nodded, swallowing dryly and trying to think of something.

“What do you want to know? Our last night with Bucky before he shipped out was a double date to the Stark expo with two dames named Connie and Bonnie. I snuck off to a recruitment fayre and I yelled at Bucky for suggesting it was acceptable for me to do anything less than him or any of those other good men shipping out, I regretted snapping at him like that ever since even though he pretended it was fine at the time. The last winter before the war started, when I-we, got pneumonia… the heat was out and _goddamn_ it was so cold in that apartment. Bucky slept in the bed with me…us, tryna’ keep me warm some,” Steve paused as he noted the expression of his counterpart changing, softening from suspicion and moving towards sadness.

“He thought I was asleep and he whispered that he loved me and I’ve never had the guts to say it back. Then the day he left and we’d yelled at each other and I still hadn’t said it back and… that enough? You need more?” Steve finished brokenly as his voice cracked, definitely able to feel tears brimming at his eyes. Rogers held his gaze sternly before letting out a heavy breath.

There was a lengthy pause where both men just stared at each-other.

“Time travel huh? Anything else weird in the future I should know about?” Rogers asked; his body language relaxing a bit further as he seemed to trust Steve’s word of the tender and painful memories, his expression shifting from angry more towards sad.

“Time travel isn’t a normal part of the future. We uh… we fucked up. Some really bad stuff happened and it was the only way to try and put it right, unfortunately for you in putting my timeline right I’ve altered yours,” Steve sighed, standing up and beginning to pace the small office he’d quickly hidden them in.

Rogers shifted from the floor to a chair and sat heavily. Steve remembered that bone-tiredness from after the battle of New York so he sympathised with the man.

“What happened? And how have you come to be here? Tell me about Bucky?” Rogers asked all at once and Steve nodded, swallowing again. He could tell the man sat before him definitely didn’t trust him, at least not yet, but he hoped by being as honest as he could he’d start to earn that trust. They were definitely going to need it if they were going to go back together to save Bucky.

“What happened – basically, a guy... alien… god-kinda… guy… named Thanos… he was looking for the Infinity Stones, there are six of them, one is in the sceptre. Once he got all six of them despite our best efforts to stop him, he used them. He wiped out half of all life, just turned to dust instantly before our eyes,” Steve recounted in a hollow voice not dissimilar to tones he’d heard used in the war by soldiers who made it back to camp as small numbers of survivors after particularly deadly battles.

“Bucky?” Rogers asked and Steve nodded gravely.

“Bucky too. Turned to dust right in front of me,” Steve forced out. “He’s back now though, they’re all back. We managed to find a way to move through time and retrieve the stones ourselves and use them to counter what Thanos had done with them, but it took us five years to get to that point. Everyone who was vanished came back exactly as they’d been when they disappeared, and no time had passed for them. We defeated Thanos… at great cost,” Steve finished grimly, remembering all too well the agony, both physical and emotional, that had coursed through him as he’d sank to his knees on that battlefield before Tony’s body.

He only realised his face was wet when he noticed Rogers staring at him with a much softer expression than he’d seen from him yet. The tension of distrust was almost gone from him now, replaced with what seemed to be genuine concern.

“How is Bucky alive?” Rogers asked and Steve sniffled, wiping his face with his hands and sinking into a chair himself.

“You’re not going to like what you’re about to hear, but remember, it’s why I’m here – because there’s a few things I think we can stop.”

*

“Steven Grant Rogers and… Steven Grant Rogers,” The Ancient One greeted them distastefully.

“What did I _tell_ Banner about messing with the flow of time? Did he not tell any of this to any of you?” she demanded and Steve held out the case containing the time stone, opening it like a peace offering.

She breathed a heavy sigh and waved her hands, the stone levitating from the case and gravitating towards the talisman at her neck which opened ready to receive it. The stone sank into its rightful place and she waved her hands again, closing the metal around it.

“You’re nine minutes late,” she scoffed and Steve snorted.

“Nine minutes huh, what a hell of a branched reality that will be,” he said lightly and she raised her eyebrow at him.

“Why are you both here? I’m assuming you are Steven Rogers from this present?” she asked of Rogers who nodded stiffly and gave her a mumbled ‘yes ma’am’. Steve would have been amused by his poor attempt to hide his confusion and disbelief were it not for the seriousness of the situation.

“And let me guess, you’re here to ask me how it would affect the timeline if you returned yourself to 1945 and never went into the ice, is that correct?” she asked of Steve who held her stern gaze.

“No, that’s not why we’re here. I don’t want to stay in 1945, we want to go back together and stop something from happening that’s going to cause a great deal of suffering to someone we care about very much. And then I’m going to find my way back to 2023. He’s going to stay in 1945, if he wants,” Steve explained and Rogers looked determined.

“Yes ma’am. We just want to put right something that was wrong,” Rogers added and The Ancient One narrowed her eyes.

“You don’t respect the laws of time and the universe at all, do you?” she asked and Steve squared his jaw before he answered.

“Not when it comes to saving the love of my life, no.”

Her stern expression didn’t waver.

“I presume you’re going to prevent one James Buchanan Barnes from falling into the hands of Hydra, correct?” she asked bluntly and both Captains nodded. She sighed and began to pace back and fore.

“The timeline surrounding you is complicated, Rogers. It seems that in all visible universes there are two common outcomes. One in which you end up with Barnes, one in which you marry and father two children with Margaret Carter,” she explained and both Steve’s looked at each other.

“That’s impossible. I knew Peggy before she died in my time - she wasn’t married to me... us, whatever. She was married to someone else, had kids with someone else. She was happy and she achieved brilliant things after I was gone,” Steve protested and The Ancient One held up her hand to silence him.

“Indeed, which tells me in your timeline yourself and Barnes are indeed destined to be together. In yours however,” she gestured to Rogers now. “It could be that you are in fact Peggy’s husband throughout this timeline.”

He screwed up his face in confusion.

“I don’t… we’re going back to save Bucky. We’re going to stop him becoming the Winter Soldier. I haven’t even t _hought_ about where Peggy is going to fit into this equation, I mean don’t get me wrong she’s great and I miss her, but… Buck needs me,” he argued and The Ancient One was still and silent for a few moments.

“In which case, you must be absolutely certain that you do not interfere in her destined life within this timeline. Do not marry her or father any children with her,” she warned looking between them both and Steve snorted at the ridiculousness of the situation. He loved Peggy, sure, but it had evolved into almost a familial love rather than a romantic one, particularly when he visited her during the years before she died.

“We’ll be sure not to do that,” he assured and Rogers nodded, flushing a little.

“I… I must inform you that this chain of events has been set in motion for some time. These universes were destined to become entangled due to the events of 2023. This is the only way to close the loop of time and keep everything how it should be. You,” she pointed to Rogers “must stay in 1945 with Barnes. Do not let the world know you survived, you’ll reappear again in 2011 out of the ice as this… younger version, his past,” and she pointed to Steve now. “And you. You need to find your way back to where you came from and cause minimal disruption in doing so. Is that understood? There’ll be three of you when you’re in 1945, and if one of you can do this much damage I need your assurances you’re going to _stop messing with things_ from here on out. You will do as instructed, yes?” she explained and then asked them sternly. They both looked at each other for a few long moments while they tried to work it out.

“So… you’re telling us that within this timeline there would then be… three Steve Rogers’, two Bucky Barnes’… and one Peggy Carter?” Steve asked, able to feel the frown lines forming on his forehead as he struggled to make sense of what he was hearing.

“Unfortunately, yes, but provided you make no other additional trips on your way you should not cause any further damage to the timeline beyond where it is already entangled. You have returned all of the stones as Banner promised?” she asked, eyeing the time-travel device strapped to Steve’s wrist distastefully.

“Yes, this was the last one,” he confirmed, looking to his side and meeting Roger’s eyes again. He didn’t look entirely certain on what was happening but he still looked determined and still seemed to be carrying some of the anger and sadness he’d shown earlier when Steve had told him the truth about what had happened to Bucky. They’d snuck out of Stark Tower after Rogers had completely trashed the office they’d been hiding out in before Steve had managed to calm him down, wiping the tears of rage a despair off his face, assuring him that Bucky was safe now in the future and that they could get to him in the past and he would be alright.

“Wait,” Rogers said suddenly, addressing The Ancient One.

“Yes?” she asked somewhat impatiently.

“Thank you, for helping me get him back.”

She looked at them both and her expression softened.

“I believe you have him to thank for that, not me,” she inclined her head towards Steve.

*

After they left The Ancient One, both of their heads a little scrambled from all of the information, they headed out to lay low and formulate a plan. Rogers had a Stark Industries credit card, not that he really understood how to use it yet, but Steve managed to explain well enough that they managed to acquire some casual civilian clothing and check into a generic-looking hotel, far enough away from Manhattan that they were unlikely to be recognised.

“So what happens with all of this now?” Rogers asked from where he was laying on the bed closest to the window, arms above his head with his hands tucked under the pillow.

Steve looked up from where he was busy tinkering with the time-travel device, checking for what must have been the hundredth time that the next destination was correctly programmed acutely aware of the lone vial of pym particles attached to his hip.

“Well, you heard what she said; we’re technically the same person now and my past can’t be altered. So… I guess me… from now will go for lunch with the team and then be out there with them picking up the mess for weeks like it happened back when I lived it,” Steve explained uncertainly.

“But surely _I’m_ you from now? And I’m here, so haven’t we like… broken time?” he asked, frowning deeply and grabbing at his short hair. Steve pushed a few strands of his own more unruly hair back out of his face.

“From the way she explained it no, I guess if this was always what was meant to happen then we’ve just closed off another avenue of the time loop that always existed?” he asked, sitting down heavily on the other bed, the one closer to the door.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve been this confused since I ran out into Times Square,” Rogers sighed, closing his eyes.

Steve was quiet for a moment, contemplating how to ask his next question and avoid a hostile response.

“Can I ask you direct question?” he tested the waters and Rogers looked at him expectantly, giving a small nod.

“Do you… did you…”

“Have feelings for Bucky? Love that goddamn _idiot_ with my whole heart since I was sixteen? Yeah, I did, I _do_ ,” he answered honestly and Steve nodded, relieved.

“Okay. So… if there’s the chance for you to stay with him in 1945 like the Ancient One said, do you want to stay?” Steve asked. Rogers body language changed a bit in response to this question as his body tensed up and then relaxed again as he got to his answer.

“Since I woke up all I’ve wanted to do is go back. I don’t… I don’t belong here,” he answered softly, not looking at his future counterpart as a single tear tracked down his cheek. Steve politely pretended he hadn’t seen, he remembered that feeling all too well. He didn’t start to really feel at home after waking up out of the ice until a long while after the events of the Battle of New York.

“Okay then. Let’s rest one night so we can go into this fresh and then let’s get you back to where you do belong,” he said resolutely, trying to hide how quickly he was crumbling when Rogers looked at him sadly.

“But where do _you_ belong?” he asked and Steve set his jaw.

“In the future, with a James Buchanan Barnes who could really use a friend right now.”

***

The time he had spent returning the stones and now waiting out in the snow for the train to pass had given him time to think. He could really see how bitter he’d become in the five years while everyone was snapped away. He’d done his best to keep Sam’s memory alive, picked up his VA groups and ran them as best he could, even if it made him feel like a hypocrite every time he told the people in the groups they should move on when it was glaringly obvious he was unable to himself.

Bucky was more difficult. He’d only just got him back before losing him again. He hadn’t had a chance to tell him everything he wanted to, and then he’d been torn from him before he could. It was a wound too painful to touch or even acknowledge, so he resolutely never mentioned him.

It felt to him like the universe kept giving him Bucky back just so he could watch him fall again. It felt like some kind of sick karma for never going back for him after he fell from that damn train so here he was, righting his wrong to the universe and to Bucky in the hope that _finally_ they would be able to be together again at last.

He moved a little further into the ravine; now able to just about make out the curve of the railway line above, just before it went into a tunnel. He remembered the tunnel from when Bucky fell, his scream snatched away by the rushing of air and echoing of the locomotive’s engine and rumbling wheels inside the cavernous stone passageway as he felt like his heart was about to burst out of his chest.

Rogers had stayed at the abandoned farmhouse they’d found to use as a base for this mission. Steve had taken one look at his shaking hands and had told him to stay there and guard the house. He’d only lost Bucky barely a year ago with the time he’d been in the ice; it was too fresh, too painful. Steve was better equipped to react less emotionally to the situation facing them and to bring Bucky in safely and without blowing their cover by making any rash or desperate decisions. To Steve’s surprise, his counterpart hadn’t argued too much.

It felt like an eternity waiting there. Steve decided he was definitely shivering by the time he heard the telltale rumble of the approaching train. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest and he closed his eyes knowing what was coming.

Bucky’s scream as he fell from the train was even more awful than Steve remembered it. Hearing his own scream of Bucky’s name echo from the train above was just as gut-wrenching. He kept his eyes closed for a long few moments until he could no longer hear the train. He was grateful he hadn’t watched Bucky fall again, especially from this angle. He’d already endured years of nightmares of that image and didn’t particularly want to refuel it in his mind.

Steve waited a few minutes before he moved, wanting to ensure Bucky’s cry hadn’t caused anyone to come and investigate. He hadn’t seen anyone at all around in the woodland or the ravine itself but he needed to be careful in case Hydra had operatives guarding the route of the train.

There were fewer trees the further he went into the ravine and therefore a lot less cover for him as he pressed on. He moved as quietly as he could, eyes scanning over the white frozen ground and seeking out Bucky’s navy coloured coat.

At one point he thought he heard voices and he stopped completely dead still behind a tree, holding his breath and listening intently. He heard nothing but the wind gusting around him.

He moved further into the ravine and as he glanced around again Steve spotted something and froze momentarily, assessing his surroundings before moving swiftly and silently in the direction of the huddled shape on the ground, half in the semi-frozen river winding its way through the ravine floor.

As he approached the navy-clad form, Steve did his best to fight the rising bile in his throat at the startling red splatter on the snow around Bucky’s broken form.

Bucky was lying on his back, his lower legs and feet dangling into the icy water, his left arm hung at a grotesque angle – his hand and lower forearm missing entirely and bleeding sluggishly into the crisp white snow. He was staring straight up, his grey-blue eyes blank and unseeing and his face completely still.

_He isn’t dead_ Steve thought resolutely to himself, trying to listen to his thoughts over the ominous howl of the wind. He hadn’t risked his life in the future to come back here and find Bucky dead. He ignored the cold and crashed through the shallow water separating him from Bucky and knelt at his side.

“Bucky? Buck! Can you hear me?” he asked, placing one gloved hand on the side of Bucky’s face. He reached his other hand to his own face and bit down on the end of the middle finger of the thick glove, pulling his hand away and removing the glove with his teeth, pressing his bare fingers to Bucky’s neck to try and find his pulse. He closed his eyes to focus, feeling a sickening cold dread rising within him until finally; _finally_ he felt a weak and unsteady flutter beneath his fingertips.

“Bucky? Can you hear me? It’s me. I-it’s Steve,” he forced out, fighting the tightening of his throat with emotion. As gently as he could he gathered Bucky into his arms and picked him up, moving him so that his legs and feet were no longer in the frigid water. He didn’t respond at all to being moved and Steve felt a rush of panic hit him, his own pulse speeding up as he tried to decide what to do. As much as he’d thought about this, about coming back here and getting Bucky before anyone else did, he hadn’t thought too much about this particular moment.

He tried his best to think practically about what medical care Bucky would need. He was still bleeding, and that needed to be dealt with first before he lost any more strength.

“Gonna take your boot laces out okay pal, gotta get something around your arm,” he said to Bucky, as quickly as he could removing the lace from one saturated boot and tying it as tightly as he dared in a makeshift tourniquet a few inches above where Bucky’s arm was severed.

“-‘teve?” a weak voice caught his attention and he looked back up to Bucky’s face to find his eyes tracking him, out of focus but trying.

“Yeah buddy, it’s me, we’re gonna get you somewhere safe,” he said, unable to stop the watery grin from creeping onto his face as he looked at his friend. This Bucky looked so _young_. His eyes didn’t carry the emotion of all the things he had seen and remembered, despite their haunted and sunken wartime appearance that Steve recalled. He’d be doing his best now to ensure that these particular eyes _never_ carried the sadness he could see in those of his own version of Bucky.

“Where does it hurt Buck?” he asked Bucky who just whimpered in response, closing his eyes. He closed his right hand into a fist slowly and Steve wondered if he was also trying to do the same with his left, if his nerves knew yet that they were no longer attached to anything beyond the mid-forearm.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected when he found Bucky laying here in the ravine but somehow this was even worse than he’d anticipated. It had never occurred to him that he’d lost his arm when he fell from the train. He had always assumed Hydra had just cut it off and replaced it, he never realised Bucky had lain out here alone in the snow with an injury like _this_ , in terrible pain and with nobody to help him.

He felt sick and his skin felt too tight, too hot, he felt itchy all over and he just needed Bucky to be back at the farmhouse where he and his 2012 counterpart been squatting the last few days and to be safe.

“I’m gonna pick you up now Buck, got somewhere safe I can take you. I got blankets there and a fire and we can get you warm, get you some water and maybe a little food and we can figure out what to do next, okay pal?” he asked in as light of a tone as he could muster.

“H-hurts,” Bucky forced out, his face contorted in pain.

“I know it does. I’m sorry Buck, god, I’m so sorry,” he whispered, fighting back yet another wave of hot tears that stung at his eyes as he gently lifted Bucky into his arms so he could carry him out and to relative safety. He was startled at how light he felt as he held him securely and began to move.

He’d thought about storming the train himself and preventing Bucky from ever falling, but he couldn’t risk Hydra finding out he was here. And he couldn’t risk his 1945 self finding out he was here and altering the course of what was going to happen with the Valkyrie. The plane needed to be crashed so the bombs never reached their targets, he knew he’d have to wait and allow those events to play out.

Bucky faded in and out of consciousness as Steve carried him carefully back to the farmhouse over an hour’s hike away through the tough mountain terrain. Mercifully he was mostly out of it, but when he would come to briefly his pained whimpering made Steve’s heart wrench within his chest. He would try to talk to him, gently push his hair back off his forehead, soothe him any way he could but he could tell nothing he could say would be of any help right now.

When they reached the abandoned farmhouse Steve was grateful to find that his counterpart already had the fire going and the space before it set out with everything warm and soft they had been able to scrounge in the last few days while they’d been hiding out.

As he carried Bucky’s broken form into the room Rogers looked utterly devastated. Steve gave him a look that he hoped translated as ‘it’s going to be okay’ but he wasn’t entirely sure it came across.

Rogers stood back in stunned silence as Steve helped get Bucky’s shivering legs out of the icy wet boots, socks, and pants, relieved to find that nothing appeared broken or damaged in his legs that he could see. Steve carefully stripped him out of his navy coat too. It was mostly dry so he balled it up for Bucky to use as a pillow as he gently placed him on the moth-eaten rug in front of the fire in his undershorts and shirt and wrapped in all of the blankets and sweaters they had managed to find. It wasn’t a lot but it was better than nothing. Bucky was shivering violently and Steve could recognise the signs of shock as his breathing became faster and shallower.

“Hey Buck, you remember that time you made me ride the Cyclone at Coney Island and I threw up?” Steve asked trying to keep his tone light and watching Bucky’s face carefully for any sign of recognition. He’d become extremely pale and his facial expression was blank as he stared straight up at the ceiling.

“You remember that Buck?” he tried again, forcing calmness into his tone. Bucky nodded weakly.

“How do you feel right now?” he asked and Bucky closed his eyes and swallowed hard.

“Like I’m… a th-row up,” he forced out.

“I thought so. Let me get you some water,” Steve insisted, fetching the metal canteen he’d scavenged and had been using and unscrewing the cap, helping his friend sit up a little so he could drink a few small mouthfuls.

“There. Any better?” Steve asked as he placed the canteen aside and helped Bucky lay back down, pulling the blankets tighter around him. He was going to be freezing tonight as every last one was wrapped around Bucky’s trembling form but he didn’t care at all for his own discomfort, only that Bucky had everything he could that may help him.

Bucky stared at him silently for a few moments and Steve saw the recognition in his eyes.

Bucky knew that he wasn’t the right Steve.

He could also see resignation there too. He knew that he wasn’t the right Steve but he also wasn’t going to question it at that moment.

“Steve?” he asked weakly, looking up at him with barely focused eyes, reflecting the dancing flames of the growing fire in the grate.

“Yeah Buck?”

“How’d you grow a beard s’fast?” he asked, slurring a little. Steve froze and looked away for a second.

“Tell you what, you promise me you’re gonna get some good rest tonight and I’ll promise you I’ll tell you in the morning, whad’ya say?” he asked and Bucky gave a weak pained smile.

“Sure.”

He passed out there in front of the fire, wrapped in all the blankets and cradled in the arms of the wrong Steve. It took a little bit of time for Rogers to approach, tentatively reaching out and pushing a few strands of Bucky’s hair off his forehead with a tender touch, his eyes tracking over his face as if he could barely believe what he was seeing.

“I thought I was never going to see him again,” he whispered as he knelt over him. If Bucky came to and found himself being watched over by both Steve’s it would have served to confuse him even more but Steve didn’t have it in him to tell his counterpart one of them should leave. He felt he owed this to Bucky too, to care for him now when he really needed it the most, just as he knew he was needed in the future as much as he knew that Bucky was unlikely to admit it.

“Well, here he is, as promised,” Steve murmured, looking down at Bucky’s lax face as he rested.

“God he’s… he’s so young. In my mind he feels older but he’s just a kid,” Rogers whispered thickly, brushing tears from his own cheeks with the back of one hand.

“You both are,” Steve responded sincerely. His counterpart was barely twenty-eight years old biologically, and Bucky here was the same age. He shifted uncomfortably as his brain supplied to him that he didn’t actually _know_ how old his version of Bucky was, with all the time Hydra had him in and out of the ice. Did _Bucky_ even know how old he was?

“I can’t believe he survived that fall,” Rogers breathed, leaning down and nuzzling his face into the sharp line of Bucky’s jaw, hands gripping two fists of his undershirt. Bucky stirred a little but didn’t wake.

“I should get outta here in case he wakes up, I don’t want to confuse the poor guy,” Steve said softly, readying himself to move but Rogers set his hand on his forearm, looking up from where he still had his face half-buried in where Bucky’s neck met his shoulder.

“We’re going to have to tell him what’s going on, you know we will,” he said and Steve tensed. It had occurred to him that yes, they probably would have to tell Bucky what was going on, and that Bucky would probably notice that there were two of him that looked distinctly different, with his 2012 counterpart more what Bucky would recognise and his own appearance something which would be more unfamiliar to the man.

“When he’s a little more lucid, yeah, we’ll tell him,” he agreed softly, unable to resist shifting his hand and carding his fingers through Bucky’s hair, revelling in the soft, thick texture. He loved his hair this way, the way he remembered him best, but Bucky’s long hair in the future intrigued him. What would it feel like to run his fingers through it? To play with it as they relaxed together on a lazy morning with nowhere to be?

Rogers lay down right where he was and curled protectively around Bucky, his front pressed against Bucky’s back where he lay on his right side. He moved slowly, wrapping his arm around him and being exceedingly careful of Bucky’s left arm. Steve gave him a nod confirming he was going to take watch that night and Rogers gave a small, grateful smile and closed his eyes to try and get some rest.

Rogers stayed awake all night regardless of his future counterpart’s watch outside, keeping the fire going and keeping Bucky warm and as comfortable as he could, watching with morbid curiosity as the wound at the end of his forearm continued to bleed sluggishly. He still couldn’t quite believe where and when he was, and that the back rising and falling against his chest belonged to James Buchanan Barnes, miraculously alive and breathing and in his arms.

By morning Bucky’s face still was deathly white and he was sweating despite his shivering. Steve crept in looking positively frozen after sitting outside keeping watch and perching himself in front of the fire, adding a few extra pieces of wood to it and glancing back at the two men curled on the rug. He caught Rogers’ eye and gave him a nod with a half-smile.

As it got light outside Bucky still slept on, not even stirring as the sun rose and the weak rays broke through the ragged thin curtains and danced across his face. After a few more hours and a whispered conversation Rogers decided to head to the nearby allied military camp to conjure up some rations for them. Bucky would need to eat something when he woke, and they needed some medical supplies to try and tend to his arm at least a little. Rogers wasn’t sure he was ready to look Bucky in the eyes yet so after he left Steve woke him gently to encourage him to drink some more water from the canteen. He regretted it when Bucky managed two sips and proceeded to vomit pitifully, Steve quickly helping him turn onto his side so he didn’t choke on the bile he was bringing up.

“Steve m-my _arm_ ,” he forced out when he was done, laying limp on his right side and gasping for breath as Steve supported his upper body, kneeling behind his head.

“It’s okay Buck, it’s gonna be okay I promise you,” he reassured softly, rubbing Bucky’s scalp soothingly with the tips of his fingers, pushing his sweaty hair back off his forehead.

He didn’t know at that moment if he believed his own promise.

***

Rogers ran the entire way to the military camp a few miles away, determined to gather up some food and needing to refill the water canteen somewhere on his journey. He knew that by this stage in the timeline he was on his way back to London by now, having transferred Zola into custody and completed his mission report. He wasn’t going to cross paths with his other self and alter the course of actions where the Valkyrie was concerned. He ran as fast as his body would carry him back to the camp.

He lightened his steps and slowed down as he approached; sneaking around behind some of the larger tents until he found the one he was looking for. There were thankfully very few troops around and nobody at all inside the tent so he ducked inside. He stole what he could in the way of food, only a few ration packs so as not to be noticed, as well as some basic medical supplies that would hopefully help him get Bucky’s arm tended to at least a little, one extra blanket that he happened across, and a large knitted sweater.

He crept back out of the tent and gripped his haul tightly before setting off at a sprint back in the direction of the farmhouse.

In the meantime, Steve stayed knelt beside Bucky a little longer before sneaking outside to find a quiet spot outside the old farmhouse to take a leak. When he crept quietly back into the house Bucky was sitting up, his back wedged against one of the dusty wooden chairs left in the abandoned living room. He had his knees curled up to his chest and his right arm wrapped around them, staring unseeingly forward towards the weak fire, still shivering with sweat rolling down his forehead.

“Hey Buck, how you doing?” Steve asked as he walked into the room, going straight for the fire again, adding more wood to try and keep it alive. For all his combat ability he couldn’t keep a campfire alive for _shit_ and the old stone fireplace didn’t seem like it much wanted to help.

“What’s going on Steve?” Bucky asked quietly as Steve busied himself with the fire. He finished adding the logs and turned round to face his friend, still on his knees in front of the fire.

“What do you mean? You got hurt on a mission so I came and picked your ass up and now we’re just laying low until the area is safe and then we can-“

“Do I look-“Bucky interrupted sharply, with more strength in his voice than Steve knew he had at that moment “-Like I was born yesterday?” he finished flatly, looking at Steve with a stern impression.

“ _You’re not Steve Roger_ s!” he suddenly roared, pointing aggressively with his right hand, rage and pain burning in his eyes.

“It’s okay Buck-“

“It’s _not_ okay! Tell me what in god’s name is going on here or I swear-“Bucky threatened and Steve raised his hands as if in surrender.

“Okay. I’ll tell you. I promised that I would yesterday, right? Do you mind if I take a look at your arm first?” Steve offered and Bucky shook his head no stubbornly, eyes widened in a feral combination of fear and pain.

“You don’t touch me again until I know who the hell you are. Are you Hydra? A… a clone or something? A robot? Did they make you in that fuckin’ room where they had me and they… they-” he asked, trailing off and looking confused and disgusted and in a _gony_ and Steve just wanted to curl this Bucky up into his arms and tell him everything.

“I’m not Hydra, not a clone or a robot either, and I’m not evil or anything. The truth is… well the truth is probably weirder,” he admitted, shifting positions on the dusty floor from his knees to his rear, so he was sat down with his legs folded in front of him.

“I am Steve Rogers, but I’m from the future. I lived this time… where we are right now. In a day or two I’m going to crash a plane full of bombs into the Arctic and I’m going to freeze. The serum will keep me alive in suspended animation and then in around seventy years I wake up, not a day older than when I crashed the damn plane. It was 2011 when I woke up and it’s 2023 now, where I’m from,” he explained, watching Bucky for his reaction. He sat completely still and silent, the only movement was his uneven breathing and the beads of sweat running down his forehead.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s _not_ bullshit Bucky!” Steve protested. “It’s not. That’s the gods-honest truth. I’m from 2023, I’m not lying to you,” he said sincerely, curling his arms around his knees and resting his chin on his curled arms. He was exhausted, emotionally and physically drained from the last few days and the months and years before that, all piling up on him seemingly at once.

“Yeah? So if you’re from the _future_ want to tell me why in the _hell_ you’d come back here? ‘Aint one round of this war enough for your stupid ass?!” Bucky hissed, eyes narrowed. He repositioned his body subtly but Steve could tell he was in pain and shifting to try and make himself more comfortable.

“I… something happened to you in the future. Something bad. I’m here to stop it,” he answered vaguely but with a stern tone to his voice so Bucky would realise he wasn’t kidding around.

Bucky made an exasperated sound and allowed his head to slump back onto the chair he was leaning against. He stayed still like that for a few moments before he lifted his head back up and looked at Steve again.

“So… what, you can’t tell me? Will it like destroy the world or something? Create some… paradox and the whole universe implodes?” he asked and Steve thought for a moment about how to answer. Bruce hadn’t warned him about telling people things and if it could cause the end of the world. He was hardly going to start spouting off to everybody, but Bucky? Scared, injured, distrustful Bucky? He needed the truth. And he deserved the truth.

“I can tell you. It ‘aint a fun story, but if you’re sure you want to hear it, I can tell you,” he offered flatly and Bucky stared at him for a few moments, the reflection of the fire dancing in his blue-grey eyes.

“Sure, let’s hear what’s so bad you _fuckin’ time-travelled_ to stop it from happening,” Bucky snarked and Steve set his jaw so as not to bite at the jibe. He composed himself for a second before he started talking, eyes locked with Bucky’s and willing the barely contained rage he saw there to abate.

“After falling from the train you laid in the snow for I don’t know how long. The super-soldier serum that Zola experimented on you with kept you alive until you were picked up by… I don’t know who exactly, but you ended up in Hydra’s hands. I didn’t know you’d been given a version of the serum and I believed… we all believed that you were dead when you fell, and because of that nobody came back for you and I’m sorry,” Steve began. Bucky looked taken aback to be immediately called out on having had a form of the serum, but he didn’t try to answer back or interrupt Steve, so he continued.

“While I was frozen for seventy years they kept you, they experimented on you, brainwashed and trained you, and they cut off the rest of your arm and replaced it with a cybernetic one. They called you the _Winter Solider_ … you… they erased everything that made you, you. You uh… you in the future, you told me that they used to wipe your memories using electro-shock treatments, torture you, use you to assassinate targets and then throw you back in chryo-freeze until it was time for the next target. Then they’d wipe your memory again, every time you got close to remembering who you were, they’d rip it out of you again, over and over. Then they sent you to kill someone close to me, and then me, and I refused to fight you. You… uh… you almost killed me, and I hurt you, but then you started to remember. You started to break free of their conditioning but then you took off on the run because you didn’t really know who you were yet. It took me almost two years to find you again but eventually we managed to get you help, get the programming out of your head and try to get you some autonomy back. And then some really bad stuff happened, and now I’m here I guess,” Steve finished lamely, eyes looking anywhere but at Bucky.

There was a long silence. It stretched and stretched and Steve agonized as he watched Bucky’s face run through emotions.

Suddenly, shattering the uncomfortable silence, a swift kick was aimed at Steve, hitting him squarely in the shin. He flinched and snapped his gaze back to Bucky’s face to find his expression had changed to one which could only be described as _murderous._

“What? I told you it wasn’t exactly a fairytale, pal,” he said grimly and Bucky shook his head, lips pressed tightly together in a furious line.

“You left him, Steve, you fuckin’ asshole! Don’t you think he needs you more than I do? Goddamn if he survived all that and found his way back to you, don’t you think I’d be tough enough to manage the same? And no, it don’t exactly sound like a fuckin’ picnic but surely he needs your help to get over that _shit_ more than I do to avoid it?” Bucky demanded; his voice coming out all Brooklyn and fiery rage like Steve hadn’t heard for years. Steve looked at him incredulously for a few moments, it hadn’t been the reaction he’d expected but really he knew Bucky was right.

As soon as this Bucky was somewhere safe Steve needed to find a way back to his own.

“He only left him to bring me here to you,” Rogers’ voice carried around the doorway of the room and Bucky looked horrified as he walked slowly inside, carrying an armful of supplies.

“Jesus Christ. This is hell. It _has_ to be hell,” Bucky groaned.

“Hey, we’re not so bad, are we?” Steve asked with a tentative attempt at a smirk.

“There’s fuckin’ _two_ of you?!” Bucky gestured wildly with his right hand and then grimaced, coughing weakly.

“Settle down Buck, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Rogers scolded, coming over now with his pile of supplies. In his hands he had a selection of medical supplies; gauze, iodine solution, bandages and antibiotic pills.

“Explain. Now,” Bucky grit out, clearly now even more confused.

“I uh… I never said this time-travel thing was entirely without consequences. He’s one of them,” Steve explained, nodding to Rogers. “When I went back to 2012 to take one of the stones, I affected his timeline so much that he couldn’t really stay there. So since he’s only been out of the ice for barely a year, we figured I’d bring him back here, to where he should be.”

“Stones?” Bucky asked flatly.

“Yeah the uh… we had to collect all six Infinity Stones to use them to undo what Thanos did. The Infinity Stones each control one aspect of existence in the universe,” Steve explained and Bucky looked even more exasperated.

“Magic fuckin stones Stevie. I’m either dead or hallucinatin’ or _something_ -“he trailed off with a groan, shifting his body again.

“Buck please take it easy-“Rogers attempted, stepping forwards. Bucky recoiled away.

“Don’t touch me! Neither of you… just… just don’t touch me,” he protested weakly, his eyes staring out but not focusing.

Steve gave his counterpart a pointed look and together they fell silent, waiting just a few minutes before Bucky passed out, his face going lax and body going limp where he was still leaning his back against the rickety old wooden chair.

“We gotta clean up his arm, it might already be infected,” Rogers said immediately, taking the initiative and stepping forwards, gently lowering Bucky’s slumped form so he was lying flat again.

“Okay, how are we gonna do this?” Steve asked, looking in detail for the first time at the end of Bucky’s arm. He could see splintered bone and muscle tissue protruding from the limb where it was severed at the mid-forearm. The bleeding had stopped sometime in the morning but there was a thick crust of dark blood over and around the wound now.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Rogers said uncertainly as he lined up all the medical supplies he’d foraged, as well as the water canteen.

“We need to clean the blood off, get it washed out and disinfected as best we can then dry it and wrap it,” Steve said firmly, deciding that was the best course of action to try and keep infection out. He wasn’t confident that Bucky’s pallor and sweatiness wasn’t caused solely by his pain level and that he wasn’t already harbouring an infection.

“Do you… can you…?” Rogers asked, gesturing at the arm and the water canteen. He looked squeamish.

With a nod Steve began to carefully strip Bucky out of his shirt and undershirt. His heart ached as his left upper arm and shoulder came into view, present and whole and without the mass of scarring surrounding his own Bucky’s shoulder. He’d overheard a very unpleasant conversation about the scarring as they’d stayed at the cabin with the others prior to Tony’s funeral and he found it hard to put out of his mind now.

_Steve decided it was about time to go to bed. He bid goodnight to Wanda and Sam who were staying sat out on the porch for a while longer and headed inside and quietly up the stairs. The lounge was full of people sleeping on every available flat surface so he was as quiet as he could be with his footsteps._

_At the top of the stairs he then padded softly towards the room he was sharing with Bucky, Sam and Clint, each of them taking turns alternating between the two twin beds and the camping mattresses which had hastily appeared from somewhere when it turned out so many people were staying in the days leading up to the funeral._

_“I’m just saying man, I may have only had a tiny taste of it, but I know how it feels to not drive for a while, and it took me a long-ass time afterwards to feel like I was okay again and that I trusted myself again,” his enhanced hearing caught Clint speaking and he stopped dead still, barely breathing as he listened._

_“I just… my mind… my body. It’s not me. It doesn’t feel like me. It_ hasn’t _felt like me since I woke up the first time after they attached that damn_ thing _to me and I tried to claw it off with my other hand,” Bucky murmured in response. Steve’s heart sank. He’d seen the scars trailing away from where the original Hydra arm had met Bucky’s body but he’d not wanted to believe the shape of them really meant what he thought it did. He couldn’t even imagine the terror Bucky must have felt at waking up with a strange new limb attached._

_He’d silently retreated a few steps and waited a long few moments before walking back towards the room more noisily, ensuring Clint and Bucky would hear him approach so they could finish their conversation in private without him barging in._

Bucky remained out of it while they cleaned his wound, stirring only slightly and whimpering in pain as Steve dabbed at the mass of dried blood as gently as he could. Once most of the blood was gone they flushed the wound with clean water before using the iodine solution to disinfect it as best they could. Steve waited until it all looked dry before wrapping it carefully in a clean bandage with a gauze pad from the supplies Rogers had pilfered from the allied camp. He wished for modern medicine, the kind Bucky could get in his timeline, but he knew they’d have to make do with the best they could get for now.

“When he comes round we need him to take some of these antibiotics,” he said, looking at the bottle of pills. Rogers nodded, curling up nearer to the fire and trying to supress a shudder.

“Are you alright?” Steve asked his counterpart who defiantly set his chin and nodded.

They prepared themselves some rations and ate in silence, keeping Bucky’s portion aside for him for when he woke.

“Hopefully his serum kicks in soon and he heals up fast,” Steve commented as they both watched Bucky sleeping.

“I never realised that’s what they’d been doing to him. When I got him out of that room, I never suspected- _god_ I should have gone back for him when he fell, I should have gone back,” Rogers cracked, choking on his words as his eyes welled with tears that he hastily wiped away with the back of his hand.

“You couldn’t have known that he’d survive. And it’s okay, he’s here now, he’s safe,” Steve soothed, reaching out to tentatively rest a hand on his shoulder. Bucky stirred at Rogers’ slightly raised voice, his face contorting in pain as he did so.

“Should have jumped off the damn train after him,” Rogers sighed miserably, shaking his head as he gently reached out and ghosted a light touch through Bucky’s hair.

“In another universe, maybe we do,” Steve suggested, feeling a fresh pang of guilt as he allowed himself to wonder what his own Bucky was thinking and feeling right now.

_I’m coming back, Buck. I promise. I’m coming back._

****

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, next part coming soon! Please let me know what you think so far?


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy this next part. It's a little shorter but part 4 is coming soon :)

**2023**

“How is he still _alive_ when all he eats is junk food?” Sam asked Steve as they watched older Bucky demolish a disturbing quantity of McNuggets.

“I don’t know,” Steve sighed, shaking his head as older Bucky began to slurp noisily at his giant strawberry milkshake, smirking at him around the straw.

They’d stayed a while with Bruce, talked about time and how Steve _hadn’t_ destroyed it by doing what he had done. Bruce had explained it again – changing the past doesn’t change the future. Steve’s former present, the one who had left the return the stones, now became the past, and couldn’t alter what he’d already done in this past.

It had made Bucky’s brain feel like it was going to melt out of his ears but Bruce had put it very simply for him. Steve was okay, he was safe and he wasn’t going to disappear due to a time-travel paradox or anything of the sort. Bruce explained that these events must have been set in motion a long time ago, forming some sort of loop in time, and that Steve must have always been destined to do this and that this Bucky and Steve had always been hanging around in their timeline - just out of sight as they knew where and when to avoid so they wouldn’t cross paths with anyone. The stones had all been returned correctly which was key to the flow of the timeline, what Steve had done, provided he or the other two didn’t use their knowledge of the future to affect any major world events, would not have created a branched reality. Nobody had noticed them in the years intervening 1945 and the present day because they were both presumed dead, nobody was looking for them.

After Bruce had finished explaining (the only one who even pretended to understand was Steve) they’d eaten there with him and then got on the road but now it was getting late and everyone was hungry again after driving for hours so they’d stopped. Sam had changed his mind and insisted on coming along for the trip so he could argue with present day Steve when he came out of chryo-freeze about the fact that older Steve was trying to give his shield to him.

“If Steve thinks he can just pass this along to me when he’s still young and able-bodied he’s got another thing coming,” he’d seethed, Bucky could tell he wasn’t being entirely serious with his annoyance, but that all the same he did want to talk to Steve about it.

Older Steve had insisted it had been what their Steve had instructed, but Sam was having none of it without a conversation with the man himself. Passing on the mantle of _Captain America_ was hardly something to be done via a third-party.

“He’s gonna be so pissed. Said he wanted to come out of the ice as just Steve, no more Captaining for him,” older Bucky had said.

“Well he can talk to me about it himself. He’s being a coward by having someone else pass a message along to me,” Sam said stubbornly and Bucky half shrugged, agreeing with Sam but also seeing Steve’s side.

“You not hungry kid?” older Bucky asked, jolting his younger counterpart out of his thoughts. He’d eaten nothing all day, his mind running entirely too loud for him to even contemplate food.

“Nope,” he replied shortly, not meeting his eye.

“Not even one nugget?” he pressed, smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

“Have you ever eaten much fast food?” Sam asked Bucky across the table and Bucky hesitated, rifling through his memories. He remembered the smell of this stuff sure; that greasy, salty-sweet, heavy smell that he seemed to frequently encounter especially in cities, but he didn’t recall the taste. His time with Hydra didn’t involve him eating anything much that wasn’t a high-calorie liquid through a naso-gastric tube fed right into his stomach after he came out of chryo-freeze, and his time on the run involved him trying to just find and eat basic things he recognised from his past life. Fruits, vegetables, bread, sometimes meat, sometimes canned goods. Safe staples and whenever he could get them, things that tasted like a home long ago lost to time.

Wakanda fed him well once he was awoken, and he’d eaten anything Shuri had suggested he try, but everything had been hearty and home-cooked, and not this artificial-smelling processed food.

“I don’t think so,” he answered Sam slowly, meeting his gaze.

“You’re missing out,” Sam smiled, taking a big bite out of his burger.

“I don’t eat it either Buck, let’s go find something else huh?” old Steve offered and Bucky looked at him for a long few seconds, feeling the horrible stinging in his eyes of imminent tears as he did.

“Woah, hey man, you wanna go for a walk with me for a second?” Sam had offered quickly, setting his ridiculously proportioned burger down on its wrapper and giving him a look of genuine concern. It was the first time Bucky had seen Sam really look at him like that where he couldn’t identify any trace of the usual suspicion Sam directed at him.

Bucky blinked hard and cleared his eyes.

“No, I’m okay. I’ll go with Steve and find something else to eat, meet you back here,” he said firmly, standing up and then offering his hand to Steve to help him out of his seat. Steve took hold of the vibranium hand and allowed Bucky to help him to his feet.

Side by side they walked out into the cool evening air, Bucky walking slowly to match Steve’s pace.

“I know this must be really hard for you,” Steve said softly, his hand coming up as if he was going to set it on Bucky’s shoulder but then hesitating and stopping.

“It’s… yeah. It’s been a hell of a few days,” Bucky nodded, setting his jaw. For him it had only been just a few days since he was minding his own business and tending his goats, and a few more since he woke up on the ground in Wakanda looking for his gun, but he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that it been five years, they’d walked through golden portals made of magic and fought Thanos and his armies and had won. Natasha was gone. Tony was gone. His Steve was gone, for now at least, and god it _hurt_ that they were gone.

“It must be hard to see me like this, and to see him and know how different his life has been to yours.”

Bucky was silent for a long few moments, walking a little way further to a railing and leaning against it, looking away from Steve and the building.

“I’ve accepted what happened to me, I… I think I did a long time ago. When I decided to go back into the ice in Wakanda, I guess that was me really taking control of it. I don’t know if I’ve accepted what’s just happened to the world but I guess there’s gonna be a lot of people feeling like that right now,” he responded, shivering a little as a cool breeze rolled around them and ruffled his hair.

“But not all of those people watched their best guy disappear in front of them only to reappear as an old man,” Steve pointed out, standing beside Bucky now leaning on the railing.

“What makes you say Steve is my best guy huh? Maybe I met somebody else. I’m not him, remember, I’m my own timeline,” Bucky asked, turning his head a little to look at Steve beside him. In the dim light he looked even older and Bucky wondered how the hell either of them were still alive, especially to be driving halfway across the country.

“Because I saw the look on your face when you saw me, and I also saw the look on your face when you found out who I _wasn’t_. You keep your face pretty straight but… well, I’m not sure how to tell you this kid but you’ve got the saddest eyes I think I’ve ever seen. I can see every tiny bit of pain that’s in you,” Steve said seriously and Bucky blinked, looking away again.

“Steve told me that uh… that you remember all of it. All that stuff they made you do?” he asked and Bucky closed his eyes now, trying to shield himself as an onslaught of unpleasant memories affronted his senses. He could hear people screaming, begging, smell burning fuel and dust and rubble and gunpowder and _blood_ and could feel the ghost of his hand around a gun, a knife, a windpipe slowly crushing-

“Buck?” Steve’s hand on his shoulder jolted him back. He blinked to his senses and realised his face was wet and that he’d completely spaced out.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. I guess where I’m going is I know this is hard for you to see me like this, but it’s also really hard for me to see _you_ like this,” he explained gently and Bucky just looked at him as he willed his own heartrate to return to normal and the nausea from the memories to die down as he hastily wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“What I’m trying to say is I’m sorry for everything that you’ve had to go through. You didn’t deserve that Buck, nobody would, but ‘specially not you. When your Steve told me and Bucky what was gonna happen to you if he hadn’t have stopped it I… I can’t even tell you how it made me feel when he said what happened to you. I’ve had a long whole life to think about it and I have. I’ve thought about it every day and I’m sorry. Wish I could do something for you to take it all away,” he said sincerely, emotion glinting in his own eyes in the form of a few tears in the watery blue depths. His hand remained in place on Bucky’s right shoulder, grounding him.

Bucky was speechless for a moment, fighting back his own emotional response.

“He did, right? I mean, doing something to take it away? He… you, did it. He’s in there eating his fuckin’ nuggets and he’s a happy old guy who’s had a good life and he’s been happy with you, so it’s done, right?” Bucky blurted out through a strained half-smile.

“No Buck, you’re _not_ the same person. You’ve endured things he’s never had to endure, and I think we owe you for altering the course of our lives so that Buck and I got to live how we have. As horrific as it was, if what happened to you had never happened, your Steve would never have come back so hell-bent on saving you… him, I don’t know, this all gets confusing to me sometimes,” he finished, shaking his head with a weak smile.

“Was that really his motive though? Did he really come back planning to save you too, or did he come back to live his life in the past with the other me? And you got in the way so he stepped aside and froze himself?” Bucky asked, all his insecurities bubbling up at once. Steve frowned, but he looked concerned.

“No, not at all. He didn’t leave me in 2012 because he wanted _me_ to be with my Bucky and he had a chance to not only fix my timeline but to give us that, not himself. _You’re_ his Bucky, kid. There’s only one James Buchanan Barnes for him, and that’s you, and that asshole inside who is no doubt committing the atrocity of mixing ketchup and mayo together is the one for me,” Steve said with a smile and Bucky managed to huff a small laugh, wiping away a few stray tears with the back of his flesh hand.

“You can’t mix ketchup and mayo, that’s just wrong,” Bucky sighed with a weak chuckle and Steve’s eyes wrinkled at the corners as he nodded in agreement.

“Spent my whole life tellin’ him, my whole life,” he sighed and looked away, losing himself in thought again. Bucky took the opportunity to gather his thoughts a little more in the few moments of silence between them before Steve spoke again.

“You gotta know… the biggest regret of my life, of _both_ of our lives is that we didn’t come and save you from them. We’ve lived seventy years knowing you were out there hurting and it’s… it’s not been easy, it really hasn’t,” Steve said sincerely and Bucky tensed. It had only occurred to him in passing that this Steve and Bucky would surely have been alive at the time when he was being tortured by Hydra, he didn’t quite understand where the timeline diverged as obviously this Bucky had been saved from the snow so he hadn’t even been certain that they could have done anything, but if they’d been around all along…

“The timeline thing… it gets really confusing. I won’t lie to you and tell you I fully understand it, but you were still out there in our lifetimes and it was… it was really hard, Buck, to know what was happening to you and not be able to do anything about it,” Steve sighed heavily, meeting Bucky’s eyes. The intense gaze lingered for a few long seconds before he continued speaking. “It was… real hard, but in 2014 we watched those Helicarriers fall on the news and we knew, we knew it was the start of you coming home.”

“And then Vienna happened,” Bucky sighed, closing his eyes. He felt cold dread flood through him at the memory of Zemo triggering him again, waking the solider and pushing Bucky Barnes back into the passenger seat to just watch as his body was used. He could see it all so clearly, fighting Tony, Natasha, Sharon Carter, T’Challa… almost hitting Steve with a goddamn _helicopter_.

“And then Vienna happened, but we knew it wasn’t _you_. Steve told us it wasn’t you. And then he got you back, got you to Wakanda,” Steve said and Bucky nodded, taking a deep steadying breath.

“Yeah, he did. I liked it there,” he said with a faint smile.

“I’m sure you can go back there someday, and I’m sure I know a guy who’d go with you in a heartbeat if you asked him,” Steve responded, clapping his hand onto Bucky’s flesh shoulder and giving it a reassuring squeeze.

***

A short while later found the four of them in the lobby of a small motel, Sam and Bucky hanging back while Steve and Bucky’s counterpart sorted out some rooms. It was on the nicer end of the spectrum as far as motels went, Sam putting his foot down firmly about staying anywhere that didn’t meet his standards.

“Listen man, Steve has _no_ standards when it comes to motels. You shoulda’ seen some of the dives me made us stay in while we were lookin’ for you, those are some places I will _never_ forget,” he sighed with a small, uncertain laugh.

“Sorry you had to do that,” Bucky responded quickly and Sam’s face softened into a kind expression.

“Oh, no man, it’s not your fault. Our Steve just can’t appreciate a nicer motel compared to one that you pay by the hour y’know,” Sam smirked and Bucky nodded; one side of his mouth quirking in a small smile.

“Alrighty. So. Good news and bad news. The good news is, they only had two doubles left, and the bad news is they only had two doubles left, so, who’s bed-buddying with who?” Bucky’s counterpart asked as he walked back over, two room key-cards in his prosthetic hand.

Bucky looked at Sam.

“Well seeing as you guys are married and all you can take the one room, and Barnes and I will take the other and we’ll just flip a coin for the bed,” Sam responded as if sensing Bucky’s uncertainty to answering the question.

“You sure? We couldn’t decide if you guys had had a lover’s quarrel or something, seems a little tense here,” older Bucky gestured between the two men with the hand still holding the two room key-cards in his left hand. The more Bucky looked at the hand the more he wondered if Stark had something to do with making it. It wasn’t as aggressive-looking as the Hydra arm had been, but it also didn’t have the elegance of his current Wakandan version. Older-Bucky’s arm was somewhere between the two, and in an off-flesh tone that wasn’t immediately obvious at first glance that it wasn’t his own hand. It was only when you noticed the numerous joints that you saw it was obviously a prosthesis.

“I tried to kill him a couple of years ago when I wasn’t myself and I don’t think he’s forgiven me yet,” Bucky answered, almost shocking himself at the sound of his own voice answering the question. He hadn’t planned to say anything but it had just come out.

Sam gave him a withering stare.

“You broke my wings.”

“You shot at me!”

“You jumped onto the _roof of my car and tore the steering wheel out!”_

“You shot at me. A _lot_. You actually hit me in the leg, I have a scar,” Bucky glared and Sam folded his arms. Older Bucky watched with a raised eyebrow.

“Well. You guys should talk this out in your room, here ya’ go,” he smiled, holding out one key to Sam who took it without taking his eyes off Bucky.

They bid goodnight to Steve and Bucky’s counterparts before heading upstairs to their room, the older men staying on the ground floor.

“You can have the bed Sam, the floor is fine for me,” Bucky said quietly as Sam unlocked the door with the card and it clicked open.

“What if I wanted the floor?” he challenged, flicking the lights on as they entered the room.

“Then, I guess there’s plenty of floor for the both of us,” Bucky sighed, looking around. The room was clean and pleasant, if a little plain. It would certainly be comfortable for the night.

“I uh… you’re real torn up, aren’t you?” Sam asked hesitantly, as though afraid asking the wrong question would turn Bucky full Winter Solider and send him on a rampage.

“Yeah. I am. And I’m tired,” Bucky sighed, all attempts at pretence out of the window now he was behind a closed door. He didn’t care if Sam judged him. All of his rotten thoughts were festering right below the surface and he knew the other man could see right through him, so it almost made sense to just spill it himself and maintain some control of the situation, rather than let the other man draw his own conclusions.

“You know I don’t hate you man. You can talk to me, if you want to. Or you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Either way is fine. I realise we never really got to spend an awful lot of time talking between everything going on,” Sam said evenly, his facial expression open and devoid of any negative emotions, simply showing human compassion and empathy.

“You said you hated me. In the airport in Germany,” Bucky pointed out and Sam shrugged one shoulder, a small smirk on his lips.

“You sassed me, it’s the natural response. I think that was one of the first times I met this Bucky that Steve had talked my ear off about for the last few years.”

“Steve talked about me?” Bucky asked, his eyes’ locking with Sam’s again, trying to decide if he was lying.

Sam didn’t waver or break his gaze.

“Yeah, man, he told me all about you. He talked to me about how guilty he felt about what happened, how he wished he’d come to get your body after you fell off the train but that things all started moving at such a pace he didn’t have a chance to. He was really hurting, and then you showed up alive and he was hurting even _more_ and then I spent the best part of two years in disgusting-ass motels with that big idiot hurting somehow even more every day that we didn’t find you,” Sam explained gently.

Bucky sat heavily on the edge of the bed and let his head fall into his hands, feeling even more guilty now about all of the time he watched Sam and Steve from a safe distance as he let them tail him just close enough, always pulling away and leaving them without quite enough to actually find him. His left hand touched his hair as it fell forward and it startled him. He was still not used to being able to feel the texture of his skin and hair with his left hand, unused to it after years of the dull, basic feedback from the monstrosity Hydra had lashed onto his body.

“You eat anything at all today?” Sam asked and Bucky looked up at him and shook his head, staring blankly at the wall ahead of him as his brain tried to process. If Steve had been feeling all these things, all this pain, did that mean Steve cared about him in the way that he did Steve?

“Did… I mean, I don’t want to pry, but… are you sure nothing ever happened between you guys? Back in the war? Before that?” Sam asked, retrieving a bottle of water from the small fridge Bucky hadn’t even noticed in the room and uncapping it, pressing it into his right hand. It felt cool and appealing and Bucky lifted it to his lips, only realising how thirsty he really was when he was about halfway through it.

“No. I mean... I wanted to. I don’t know how he felt, I think maybe he wanted to… at times I felt like maybe he did,” Bucky responded quietly. So many thoughts and memories were racing through his mind…

_Cleaning Steve’s grazed knuckles after yet another fight he’d had to save him from, the smaller man’s hand clasped carefully in his own and their faces close as he gently cleaned the scrapes._

_Holding his trembling form as he shivered through yet another fever, his body unable to regulate his own temperature so Bucky trying to do it for him, his bare chest pressed against Steve’s bare back._

_The way he’d looked at him in that bar when he’d cheekily asked him if he was going to be keeping the Captain America outfit, that little look he’d given him that made Bucky think even for a second that Steve might have felt the same, before Peggy Carter had walked in in that damn red dress that caught the eye of every man in the place._

“I… things are different now,” Bucky forced out, his voice coming out rough as his throat constricted with emotion. He finished the rest of the water and tossed it towards the small trash can, landing it inside without it even brushing the edge.

“How are they different now?” Sam asked, sitting down on the floor in front of the bed, leaning his back against the wall and kicking off his shoes, pulling one leg into himself and leaving the other stretched out, comfortable.

“Well gee, I don’t know Sam, maybe the fact that I fucking killed a lot of people? That I almost killed Steve? That I almost killed _you_? That the way things are now, I don’t deserve-“Bucky stopped and caught himself as his voice cracked. He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath before finishing quietly.

“I don’t deserve Steve Rogers. I don’t know if I ever did.”

Sam was silent and although Bucky didn’t look directly at him he didn’t need to to know that he was staring at him with one of those ‘Sam Wilson’ looks that pierced right to your damn soul.

“Listen to me man, because I’m not one for repeating myself. Look at me, please,” Sam asked and Bucky closed his eyes tightly for a few seconds before forcing them open and looking at the other man, doing his best to ignore the burning sting of tears he wasn’t sure he could continue to hold back.

“ _You_ didn’t do those things. There was a time when yeah, I would have argued otherwise, but… I’ve read the file, hell; we’ve all read your file before we came to get you from Wakanda. And not just that, but I feel like I know you now. We all know that _you_ , James Buchanan Barnes, didn’t do those things. _You_ didn’t kill those people,” Sam said evenly and firmly. Bucky’s head throbbed and his lungs protested and he felt sick.

“I did, Sam. And I remember all of them. I think about them a lot… sometimes I can’t help it,” he whispered, hyper-aware of the hot line that a single tear was tracing down one cheek.

“And I can’t even _imagine_ what that must be like. I am so, _so_ , truly sorry about what happened to you, because Steve Rogers, pain in my ass as he is sometimes, he was right about you, he was right to save you, because you’re here now and you’re back and you’re _you._ You may not be the same guy from 1945 but you can make choices about what you do and don’t do, and you’re free now to carve out your own life and choose your own path again. Nobody is going to take that away from you. Nobody is going to take away your right to choose ever again, you understand me?” Sam asked and Bucky swallowed the lump in his throat.

What Sam was saying wasn’t necessarily true. Bucky was still unsure of his legal status. He didn’t hold a passport or any legal documents, nor any money aside from what Steve had forced him to take from him in one of their short, tense conversations between the end of the battle and Tony’s funeral. Steve had still been limping, his left arm still bandaged, covering the deep wound that Bucky knew had been healing on his forearm.

“I’m still a wanted criminal… a terrorist. I’m probably not even supposed to be in the United States, what if they decide to come looking for me? They decide that they don't trust that Shuri actually fixed me and that I’m not safe to be walking around?” Bucky asked, looking at Sam again.

There was steely resolve in his deep brown eyes.

“Anyone who tries to lock you up, put you on ice, anything... they're gonna have to get through me first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam Wilson though... am I right? <3


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all the kind comments and kudos! :) I'm really glad people are enjoying reading this as much as I'm enjoying writing it. 
> 
> Nothing too trigger-y but there's some mentions in this chapter of non-consensual cryo-chamber usage (Hydra) and some discussion around cryo-injury (because to me it's surely going to be physically really fucking hard on a person right, getting frozen? Like I feel as though the movies gloss over it and make it seem like they're just waking up from a nap.)
> 
> Also I've bumped the rating up to 'E' ahead of chapter 5 because ultimately... that's where it was always going. Not even sorry.

** Chapter Four **

Bucky eventually won in the unofficial ‘who is more stubborn’ contest and Sam took the bed. He’d relented a little bit and allowed Sam to toss him a pillow to use though, and had been quite grateful for it as he curled on his side, staring at the beam of moonlight spilling through the gap in the blinds and moving its way slowly across the floor as the night dragged on.

Sam slept, Bucky could hear it in the way he was breathing even and deep, though he suspected he would be alert again with a seconds notice if he needed to be, much like the Howlies had been in the war when they’d grabbed some shut-eye, all having mastered the soldiers skill of rapid wakefulness as a necessity for survival.

“You been awake all night?” Sam asked from the bed and Bucky startled a little, unaware the other man was now awake. It was just after dawn and unable to see the clock from his position on the floor Bucky had guessed it must be around o-six-hundred.

“No,” he lied quickly, turning onto his back and staring at the ceiling so he didn’t have to look at Sam.

Sam didn’t respond but there was a bit of shuffling, before he emerged from the bed wearing only his tee-shirt and boxers and padded over to the bathroom, carefully stepping around Bucky on the floor so as not to squash him.

He reappeared a few moments later and padded back around to the bed, picking up his phone and looking at it before throwing it down.

“You hungry?” he asked and Bucky was about to lie and say no when his stomach betrayed him with a loud growl.

“I think I saw a Denny’s when we drove in. Pancakes good with you? They do bottomless so that’ll probably suit that supersoldier appetite you’re pretending you don’t have,” he said with a knowing smirk and Bucky shrugged, sitting up and stretching a little before running his hands through his hair. He wasn’t sure he’d ever eaten pancakes in the way Sam meant, like a never ending stack, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to admit that to him right now.

“I’ll take a quick shower and we can head over. Do you want to use the shower first?” Sam offered kindly. Bucky looked at him properly. His body language was neutral, sitting on the edge of the bed half-dressed and not-threatening at all, but it still prickled something within him, still something wasn’t right about Sam being this vulnerable around him. He knew it was a display of trust, but he’d still feel better if the other man kept himself armed, just in case Shuri hadn’t been entirely successful in wiping Hydra’s control from his mind and by some fluke, something triggered him. They were planning to do extensive testing, trying to d _eliberately_ trigger from after he’d had some down time, but then Thanos had happened, and it had now been another five years due to the snap, so the testing had fallen by the wayside, replaced instead by a confident reassurance from Shuri that he couldn’t be triggered and that he would be fine now to go out into the wider world.

As much as he hadn’t been feeling enthusiastic about any tests, Bucky knew he would rather have had them than not. That little scrap of doubt in his mind that he could possibly be triggered somehow was weighing heavily on him.

“Uh… yeah. Yeah I’ll go first,” he said, breaking his eye-contact with Sam and standing up stiffly, hating himself for sleeping in jeans, and shuffling into the bathroom.

Sam pulled on his pants and headed down to the reception area and the vending machines, buying a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste and bringing it back upstairs. When he got back Bucky was out of the shower and already re-dressed, his wet hair dripping and soaking the neck of his shirt.

“Damn man, that was efficient,” he chuckled, offering him the toothbrush and the tube of toothpaste having noticed that Bucky was travelling with literally only the clothes on his back and nothing else.

“I don’t really like water,” Bucky answered flatly, accepting the items with a grateful nod and retreating to the bathroom again to use them. When he came out he sat in the chair from the corner of the room and began to towel dry his hair. Sam took his chance and headed in for his turn in the bathroom, the rumbling of his own stomach making him eager to get across to the diner and get started on a stack of pancakes.

Bucky’s mind wandered as he towel-dried his hair. By the end of today, he was going to see Steve again. Steve who had apparently just gone and spent another almost _eighty years_ in the past, just to return a version of Steve to a version of Bucky. To save one version of Bucky from the fate he had already suffered.

He caught his reflection in the mirror as he pulled the towel away from his head and closed his eyes for just a second, working up the nerve to ask his question. He waited a few minutes after Sam had come out of the bathroom, in clean clothes and smelling like fresh shower and minty toothpaste.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Who… when you look at me now, who do you see?” he asked quietly and Sam stopped tinkering with his bag and sat on the edge of the bed and scrutinized Bucky with his full attention.

“I see a guy who just helped fight the armies of Thanos with a goddamn _man-bun_ , a guy who survived the Great Depression whilst also somehow keeping skinny Steve alive, a Sergeant who was well-liked by his team and was missed when he was gone, a man who honestly? Used to scare the _piss_ outta me when I first met him, but now I see he’s a teddy bear, really,” Sam paused with a small smile, Bucky was sure Sam must be able to hear his heart beating with how hard and fast it was hammering against his ribcage.

“I see a guy who just wants to do the right thing, and I see the weight of the world on your shoulders in guilt that you don’t deserve to be carrying. You’re worried about what Steve is gonna see when we go get him out of that freezer?”

Bucky nodded, taking a moment to collect himself before he responded.

“I… I feel more… me. I know who they… made me, I’ve kept pieces of him. But I also hope the pieces of the old me are enough for Steve. I know that’s who he’s hoping I’ll be but I… I’m not him anymore,” Bucky admitted, still standing in the corner of the room where he’d been when he asked Sam his question. His hair was still dripping water slowly down his back and onto his shoulders under his shirt and he did his best to ignore the cold creeping feeling.

“You know that Steve knows you aren’t the same, right?” Sam asked gently.

“I guess.”

“And you know that he became an international fugitive and spent years on the run, messed up the lives of his friends, gave up his shield and being Captain America… to protect you, and to give you another chance, a _fair chance_ to get yourself back, right?” Sam prompted and Bucky felt another wave of crushing guilt pile onto him.

Sam was right. Steve did do those things. Steve did those things all for him, all out of hope that somewhere he was still the same guy, or enough of him to be worth saving.

“Sorry I kind of accidentally ruined your life,” Bucky mumbled and Sam laughed. Threw his head back and really laughed.

“Damn, Barnes don’t give yourself too much credit! _Steve Rogers_ ruined my life from the moment he lapped me running at the Lincoln Memorial, you only like… thirty-percent ruined it, the other seventy was all Steve,” he said with a grin that Bucky didn’t return so Sam kept speaking, changing direction when his attempt at humour fell flat.

“Neither of you guys ruined my life. Everything that I’ve done, everything that I’ve taken part in since the day I met Steve, and since I met and joined the Avengers? That was all my decision. I had the choice to walk away at any time and I chose not to, so that’s all on me now, alright? And i'm not reminding you of any of this stuff to try and guilt trip you, i'm just stating facts,” Sam switched to a more serious tone but the gentleness remained in his voice and his expression.

“I guess I wonder how Steve is going to feel now that he’s had years to think about everything. If we were gone for five years… everything could be different now. I mean, he didn’t seem like the same old Steve those few days we got with him between the battle and when he left. He barely even spoke to me,” Bucky pointed out and Sam looked thoughtful.

“Do you think he was scared that maybe something would happen and that he might somehow not make it back here? I mean, let’s be honest here, Steve had that plan in his head the second he knew about the time-travel, he’s _always_ the man with the plan. I didn’t really get to talk to him a whole lot either, not on any kind of level. He really kept to himself the whole time we were at the cabin with everybody. I mean I guess I put it down to grief… shock too maybe, but maybe part of it was that he was trying to protect himself from more hurt if something went wrong in the past and he got stuck without a way back home,” Sam suggested and Bucky walked a few tentative steps back into the room, pulling out the chair at the little desk and sitting down, facing Sam.

Everything Sam said made sense. Steve definitely would have had a plan from early on, and Steve was definitely stubborn enough that if he had an inkling that something could go wrong and that keeping things to himself was the best course of action just in case, then he would do just that.

“Makes sense,” he responded to Sam’s expectant gaze.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Sam grinned, turning back to his backpack and finishing off shoving the last few things inside. Bucky scraped his still-wet hair into a loose bun using the hair tie looped around his left wrist.

“Do you want to head out so we can find some-“

Bucky’s stomach chose that moment to let out a loud growl and Sam burst out laughing at the way his eyes widened comically in response to the unexpected sound from his stomach.

“-Breakfast?” Sam finished and Bucky nodded, deciding if he needed to face up to everything today was going to bring, the least he could do would be to start it properly fed.

***

Bucky’s older counterpart wolf-whistled as they joined him and Steve at the table in the diner across the street from the Motel.

“There he is. I knew there was a handsome devil hiding under that mop,” he grinned with a wink. Steve rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“Were you ever this weird with your counterpart?” Sam asked and Steve chuckled a no.

A young waitress came over to take orders from the two new arrivals to the table and Sam was quick off the mark with a response that sounded as though he’d practised it a hundred times. She then looked at Bucky expectantly and he looked at Sam.

“I’ll have the same,” he answered quickly and she nodded and left the four of them alone again.

What Sam was having turned out to be a bottomless stack of pancakes which the waitress would helpfully appear and refill every time they neared the end. Sam worked his way through the offered toppings and Bucky followed his lead, learning that as wrong as it sounded at first, bacon and maple syrup was d _efinitely_ acceptable to combine with pancakes.

They got back on the road when they were all finished, Sam driving now with Steve up front beside him. Bucky ended up sat to his counterpart’s left in the back seat and was finally able to get a proper look at the arm.

“And you can feel it?” Bucky was asking as he looked at it eagerly. It seemed to join just above the elbow, not all the way to the shoulder like his own.

“Yeah I can feel. I went a good couple ‘a years without one at all. Then the first few robotic models weren’t so good, they just had basic spatial awareness but not much else. The first one that had any kind of feeling, tell ya what, dangerous thing, almost ripped my dick off-“ older-Bucky was interrupted as Sam choked out a shocked laugh from the front seat and Steve gave an exasperated groan. Older-Bucky burst into peals of laughter, his younger counterpart helpless to stop himself from chuckling along too.

“You always gotta tell that story Buck?” asked Steve disdainfully.

“I thought you were right handed?” Sam pointed out from the front, raising his eyebrow at Bucky in the rear view mirror.

“Ambidextrous. Has its uses,” he shrugged back in response and Sam’s eyebrow climbed higher though he said nothing.

“Anyway, sorry Sam, didn’t mean to upset your delicate sensitivities. This model is pretty good, I’ve got pretty good feeling, hot and cold, pain if I’m damaging it, it’s pretty neat. It’s also super easy to-“he paused and rolled up his sleeve further, exposing the join to his natural arm which as Bucky suspected was just above the elbow. He gripped with his right hand and twisted the left forearm and pulled it away, revealing a socket on the end of the artificial arm which the natural arm sat in, a wire linking the two that seemed to connect into a socket installed in the end of Bucky’s own arm, linking to the prosthesis.

“Computer chips and… I don’t know… something to do with my nervous system. Hurt like a _bitch_ when they switched it on the first time,” he grumbled and Bucky nodded sympathetically. That, his own arm did have in common, even though his pain was in his shoulder, right into his spine and his ribs and his collar bone, but he couldn’t imagine it was any more pleasant focused on just the small end of a forearm.

“So, us non-bionic humans up front are feeling left out, let’s talk about something else. Who wants to play I-spy?” Sam offered and Bucky looked at him curiously in the mirror.

“Oh man, okay, you’ve missed out on road trips. I guess Hydra weren’t big on games during long journeys, but this one is self-explanatory, you’ll pick it up real fast,” Sam said lightly and Bucky shrugged a little.

“So, I-spy with my little eye, something beginning with… T!” Sam called out and Bucky watched with amusement as his older counterpart and Steve started yelling out anything beginning with the letter T that they could possibly see from the car.

As the game wore on Bucky started to wonder how long it would take him to walk to Iowa instead if he was to throw himself out of the car.

***

“Left here, no, other left!” older-Bucky directed and Sam grumbled, turning right as instructed.

“How do you not know your left from your right when your left arm is literally robotic?” Sam muttered and Bucky smirked, looking outside the window at the small town street they were now slowly driving down.

“Okay Sam, just by that big tree at the corner, that’s us,” Steve added more helpfully.

“Finally, some directions I don’t have to decode,” Sam said triumphantly, driving to the corner of the block and pulling the car into the driveway at long last.

The four men got out and Bucky grabbed older-Bucky and Steve’s luggage from the trunk, as well as Sam’s backpack which Sam gave him a small smile and nod for. Steve walked up to the front door first and unlocked the door before going in and switching off the alarm system.

“Well, c’mon in,” older-Bucky beckoned them both over to the door as he climbed the three steps up into the house.

“You doing okay?” Sam asked and Bucky nodded stubbornly, wiping his sweaty right hand on his jeans and following his counterpart into the house.

The house was surprisingly plain at first glance. It was decorated neutrally and furnished tastefully, not too modern, but very comfortable and homely. Framed pictures were hung on the walls, interspersed with larger paintings and pieces of art.

Older-Bucky wandered into the kitchen, calling back over his shoulder and offering tea and coffee and then beginning to potter about.

Sam approached a framed newspaper clipping hanging on the wall, and Bucky stepped up alongside him to look at it. It depicted a scene of rioting in New York, outside of a bar named the Stonewall Inn.

“There were a lot of things I had to hold my tongue about… pretend I didn’t know. Wars even, that I could have prevented probably if I could have told anyone what I knew from the future. This was one thing I really couldn’t keep myself away from,” Steve nodded as he saw Sam looking closely at the newspaper. The date on the corner was printed July 2nd 1969 and in the midst of the people in the scene Bucky spotted a familiar face, his _own_ face. Older than he was, but younger than his counterpart currently, sporting a hell of a moustache and with his left sleeve folded down over his stump. Steve was beside him, with wild hair and big sideburns, as they marched amongst a group of protestors.

“Stonewall riots. Widely credited as being the start of the gay rights movement,” Sam explained and Bucky nodded, part of him feeling like he somehow knew this already.

“We didn’t spend a lot of time in New York, but we happened to find ourselves there and I remembered the date and well… all we were doing was going for a drink at a bar,” Steve shrugged, feigning innocence.

“Uh huh, just a casual beer,” Sam nodded with a smirk.

Bucky’s eyes scanned the photographs in the room, the many faces of himself and Steve through the years. He had long hair, short hair, at one point almost _no_ hair it was buzzed so short. He had a moustache, glasses, beard, big sideburns, the only thing constant was his smile. Steve’s appearance varied just as much as his own and in a way that was almost more disconcerting. He’d known Steve two ways - big, and little, but he wasn’t sure he would have recognised many of these faces of Steve had he passed them in a crowd.

Something brushed against the back of Bucky’s leg and he jumped, doing his best to just look at what it was calmly without outwardly reacting too much. A small white cat was twisting round his left leg.

“Oh hey pal, mistaken identity much? I’m the real one,” older-Bucky grumbled to the cat as he came back from the kitchen. The cat looked at him and then wound itself more insistently around Bucky’s leg until he bent down and gently scratched behind its ear.

“I’ve never felt so betrayed in my life. Ali, he’s a fraud, don’t fall for his charms girl, I’m your guy,” he protested but the cat insisted and continued to seek attention from the wrong Bucky.

“Alpine Winifred Barnes-Rogers, I’m warning you,” older-Bucky attempted as he lowered himself into a squashy old armchair in the corner.

“Did you just full-name your cat?” Sam asked, bemused.

“She’s out of line! Haven’t seen her for two weeks and now she ignores me. What an asshole,” he grumbled, reaching down to untie the laces of his boots.

“You think Maddie did a good enough job feeding her?” Steve asked, idly flicking through the pile of mail that had been left neatly on the table in the entryway.

“Seems like. She aint dead is she,” Bucky’s counterpart pointed out.

“Maddie lives nextdoor, she’s eleven. I thought she could use some extra pocket money while we were on our trip so I asked her to watch Alpine and the house, if her Mom agreed which she did,” Steve explained and Sam nodded. Bucky listened but continued to pet the cat, even as his counterpart gave him a decidedly murderous glare across the room.

“You told her not to go in the garage right?”

“ _Yes_ Buck, but the only keys to the garage were with us the whole time anyway, don’t worry,” Steve shushed him but then looked more closely at Bucky and Sam.

“Didn’t that punk offer you a drink?” Steve asked, alarmed.

“Oh yeah, he did, but he didn’t give us a chance to actually answer before he was already way out in the kitchen,” Sam smirked and Bucky’s counterpart shrugged, putting on an innocent face.

“I don’t hear so good around corners these days, should’a spoke up if you wanted something.”

Steve set off towards the kitchen now, grumbling under his breath. Sam barely concealed his chuckle and Bucky continued to pet Alpine who was very insistently rubbing her face against his vibranium fingertips, her entire little body vibrating with a rumbling purr.

“We found her not long after the whole Thanos thing. We think her owners must have been… y’know, snapped away. She was so small she could sit right in my hand. We found her behind a Dairy Queen out in Des Moines, one of the streets near there was Alpine Drive so… yeah. I named her after where we found her.”

“I bet the world has been a weird place these past five years,” Sam said solemnly and Bucky lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the carpet, the cat immediately climbing into his lap.

“I’m just glad we still had eachother. Obviously even with the information from your Steve… we didn’t know… y’know, if we were going to be gone, or one of us was going to be gone. We were real lucky,” Bucky’s counterpart looked a little misty-eyed as he answered, looking at the floor for a few seconds. Steve came back into the room and broke the strange mood by handing out cold bottles of iced-tea that tasted far too sweet to Bucky but he drank it anyway to be polite.

“So you guys have any kids?” Sam asked and Steve and Bucky’s counterpart looked at each-other. Bucky felt like he’d been kicked in the gut at the question. From what he can remember from before the war he thinks he always saw that for himself, a white picket fence and two or three kids running around, but now he doesn’t know, doesn’t want to believe that any version of himself could have really had that life.

“Let’s do that later, we should wake up your Steve, right? Last time we saw him was over ten years ago. I mean, we check on the freezer all the time, got alarms and a back-up generator and all sorts, but we haven’t got him out for a long time just like he asked,” Bucky’s counterpart diverted the conversation and got out of his chair. Bucky felt bad as he gently pried the soft white cat out of his lap and placed her back on the carpet on her feet so that he could stand back up. She looked at him indignantly before strutting off in the direction of her owner, winding herself around his legs.

“You know who feeds you, atta girl,” the older man smirked.

Bucky and Sam watched as the two older men bickered over a large bunch of keys at the door from the kitchen into the garage, before finally opening it and stepping into the room once the old fluorescent lightbulb had decided to come to life a good few seconds after they pulled the cord-switch. There was all kinds of normal garage junk in there – racks of shelving held DIY supplies and cans of paint, a pair of bicycles were resting against one wall, what looked to be a motorcycle under a sheet against the other, and a lawnmower took up some space in the middle of the room, but against the back wall a huge cylinder was poorly concealed behind a big blue tarpaulin and it made Bucky’s heart rate pick up as he took it in.

“Great job, I’d never have spotted that,” Sam smirked and older-Bucky elbowed him.

“We’re getting _old_ Sam, you know how hard it is to throw a tarp over this huge-old thing?”

Steve pulled the tarp down, sending dust swirling into the air.

They were all silent for a few seconds, Bucky could hear his own heart pounding in his ears.

The cryo-tube was nowhere near as sophisticated as the one he had been kept in in Siberia, where he spent most of his time frozen. This was something far more primitive, looking almost like a large metal coffin with just a small circular window. With a horrible feeling of creeping cold he has a flash of memory of that window, of raising his hand to it as the door was closed in his face.

“They put you in this shit?” Bucky was pulled back to reality by his counterpart’s question.

“Uh… yeah. I think so. I think I remember it,” he answered, barely above a whisper and doing his best to suppress the shudder that ran through him as he looked at it again.

_Nobody is making you go in there. It’s just Steve; we’re getting Steve out of there. You don’t have to go in there. Never again._

“You’re a little pale, man - just take deep breaths, nice and easy,” Sam instructed gently from at his side and Bucky nodded, trying to force his face into something neutral that didn’t betray so much of his current level of panic. He forced himself to look at the tube again, to look through the small window and see Steve but it was completely obscured by a thick layer of ice.

Steve stepped up and with strength that far exceeded his age, pulled free three of the four clamps that held the door closed.

“Last time he came out he was kinda uh… I think it’s pretty hard on him,” Steve explained as Bucky’s counterpart dug around on one of the nearby shelves, producing a plastic bucket, warm blanket and a couple of old towels.

“Ready?” he asked. Bucky took a second to realise the question was mainly directed at him and he nodded slowly, stepping forwards.

“Yeah, good idea, you might want to be ready to catch him. Alright, rise and shine pal,” Steve said, grimacing slightly at the exertion as he released the last clamp and pulled the door enough that it opened slightly allowing a rush of cold air to escape into the garage. Condensation caused a great billow of frozen mist to flow around their ankles as the gas escaped the chamber. Steve pulled the door open wider and Bucky could now see clearly the form of the man inside. He didn’t look any older than he had when he’d stepped onto the platform to return the stones.

Bucky held his breath for the agonizing few seconds it took before Steve sputtered to life, taking a great gulp of air and starting to cough uncontrollably, his face screwed up in pain and his eyes still closed. He reached out blindly, panicking, still coughing and unable to breathe.

“What do we do?!” Sam asked Bucky’s counterpart, worried.

“Nothing we can do,” he said sadly as Steve pitched forward, Bucky catching him in his arms and supporting his weight as he continued to cough and then began to dry heave. Bucky’s counterpart stepped forward with his plastic bucket and helped, gently setting his flesh hand on younger Steve’s face and guiding one of his hands to the edge of the bucket so he could feel it was there, bringing it up to his mouth. Bucky’s nostrils flared at the unpleasant tang of stomach acid as he held Steve’s convulsing body up as best he could.

“S’just us Steve, it’s time,” older-Bucky soothed, rubbing the younger man’s back with his left hand, letting Steve blindly hold onto his own puke bucket now as he brought one of the towels up to his face to wipe off his mouth and nose.

Steve was saying something, bringing his arms in and using them to try and fight Bucky off where he was holding up most of his weight for him.

“What’s that pal?” older-Bucky asked, removing the bucket and towel and throwing the blanket around Steve’s shoulders. He immediately shrugged it onto the floor and opened his eyes, his focus darting around the room unseeingly as he continued to wriggle against Bucky’s grip.

“Steve. Steve I- I… it’s just me,” Bucky attempted quietly as he had to tighten his grip on Steve to stop him from struggling away and no doubt falling on his ass. Steve stopped struggling instantly but continued to gasp for breath.

“…Buck?” he asked weakly and Bucky nodded.

“Yeah, both of us, apparently,” he responded with a weak laugh, tears stinging at his eyes.

“I- I can’t see, t-takes a couple hours,” Steve explained weakly. He was drooling, deathly pale and shivering all over.

“I remember. I remember how much it hurts to wake up,” Bucky nodded, surprising even himself with the memory. Coming out of the ice in Wakanda hadn’t been like this, hadn’t lurched and ached and _hurt,_ but he remembered it now, and he remembered being dragged to the chair every time, always before his eyesight had come back.

“Let’s get him in the house so he can lie down in the guest room,” Steve’s counterpart suggested and Bucky nodded, repositioning himself so he could take almost the entirety of Steve’s weight and slowly helping him through the garage door, back through the kitchen and into the living room.

“S’this way,” his counterpart instructed, ducking ahead of them as Bucky paused to reposition Steve’s mostly limp form.

“Gotta pick you up, okay?” Bucky asked of Steve who didn’t really respond. Bucky leant down and repositioned his grip, lifting Steve easily in a fireman’s carry and following his counterpart down the hall into the room he was beckoning them into.

He gently set Steve down on the double bed, the covers already pulled back. He pulled them back over Steve’s trembling form and on instinct sat down on the bed beside him, one hand pushing his hair back off his forehead, the other rubbing his upper arm and shoulder.

“I know it sucks but old Steve said you should drink this,” said Sam, appearing at Bucky’s side and holding out a bottle of sports drink to Steve. He took Steve’s hand and placed it in his grip and Steve made a face.

“What year- am I- did we-“ Steve started out, his face still screwed up in pain.

“It’s 2023, Thanos is gone and everyone is back, you returned the stones and time wasn’t destroyed in the process. You’re safe,” Sam explained gently.

Steve moved his hand a little, feeling the shape of the bottle he’d been given.

“Orange? Or berry?” he asked and Sam chuckled.

“It’s orange you picky asshole.”

Bucky felt like he could do a backflip out of sheer happiness as he helped Steve undo the cap of his sports drink and take a few tentative sips.

“I think…” he started as he watched Steve drink and then stopped, frowning.

“You think what?” Sam asked and Bucky shook his head.

“I… when they woke me up from that tube… my hand… my real hand, and my feet were… they didn’t work. They were dark red and black and-“

“Frostbite. I had it too, firs’ few times I went t’sleep,” Steve forced out.

“Jesus,” Sam breathed.

Bucky and Sam seemed to realise at the same moment that both Steve and Bucky’s counterparts had left them alone with Steve.

“You can feel your hands and feet alright now though, right Steve?” Sam asked and Steve nodded weakly. Bucky took one of Steve’s large hands in both of his own, flesh and vibranium, and gently rubbed it with his own fingertips, bringing circulation back to the digits. They were cold but he wasn’t frostbitten.

Steve frowned and pulled his hand away from Bucky’s, reaching out blindly with both hands until they closed on Bucky’s left forearm. He touched it cautiously, training his fingertips over the vibranium, working his way up to the inside of his elbow, his bicep, his shoulder. Bucky held his breath as Steve’s hands skimmed over where the arm met his body, sliding over his clothing, finding his neck, fingertips ghosting over his nape, up to his hair, tangling in the loose bun that was holding it off his face, his other hand settling on his jaw, thumb slowly moving back and fore over his unshaven face, just catching the corner of his lips as it did so. Bucky dared to breathe a little bit, just a tiny inhale. It caught in his chest, his lungs felt too small and he felt like he could burst into flame from the points of Steve’s touch. Nobody had touched him like this since before. Before the war and the ice and the hell of Hydra and the fight and Wakanda and-

“Oh boy. Okay I’m gonna just-“ Sam smirked, getting up from where he’d been crouching beside Steve on his other side and high-tailing it from the room, closing the door behind him.

“Buck? Breathe,” Steve instructed gently and he exhaled shakily.

“You okay?” Steve asked and Bucky nodded slightly, causing his face to press closer into Steve’s hand resting lightly on his jaw and cheek.

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you if you’re okay?” Bucky asked in a small voice and Steve gave a weak chuckle that turned into another coughing fit.

“I will be. Few hours for my eyesight to come back, day or so to stop aching, I’ll be fine,” Steve murmured softly, like he was starting to drift off to sleep.

“I should let you get some sleep,” Bucky said quickly, standing up sharply from the bed causing Steve’s hands to part from his skin.

“All I’ve done is sleep. For a really, _really_ long time,” Steve responded tiredly. It sounded like a protest but Bucky could tell Steve was way too weak to put up a fight.

“How… I… you went back into the ice, for another eighty-some years,” Bucky wondered aloud and Steve nodded.

“Was the only way,” Steve mumbled, reaching out a hand blindly towards where Bucky was standing. Bucky looked at the outstretched hand for a long few moments before gently taking it in his own right hand, curling his fingers around it protectively.

He sat down on the floor next to the bed, leaning his head against the mattress and keeping Steve’s hand held within his own. Steve rolled onto his side with great effort and then lay still, breathing slow and even.

“I wanna talk but my brain hurts. Everything kinda hurts,” Steve murmured and Bucky made an affirmative sound, squeezing his hand.

“Get some sleep you time travelling punk. We can talk when you wake up,” he responded easily, for a blissful few seconds feeling like nothing had ever happened. If he closed his eyes and focused on the feeling of Steve’s hand in his he could pretend it was before everything. He could pretend that they were back in Brooklyn in their old shitty apartment, that Steve had another fever and he was just staying awake to talk to him until it broke, that he’d be back at work at the docks tomorrow to make sure the rent was covered for them both.

It doesn’t take long for Steve to start snoring softly, his hand finally warm to the touch going lax in Bucky’s. He gently tucked Steve’s arm under the blankets with the rest of him, pulling them right up so he’d be nice and warm.

At the door something made him pause and he looked back at the man in the bed. Steve was absolutely flat out and obviously already in a deep sleep. Bucky crept back over to his bedside and before he could doubt himself leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on Steve’s forehead, tucking him in a little tighter before leaving the room.

Steve didn’t stir.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always all mistakes are my own. Would love to hear what you guys think :)


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the kind feedback on the last chapter <3
> 
> Sorry this one took a bit longer than planned to get out, I moved house mid-way through the writing of it which didn't help. This chapter has kind of kicked my ass and if there are any mistakes left they are my own, I'd be super grateful if you can point them out and I can fix them :)
> 
> There's going to be six parts now instead of the planned five because I can't help myself. I regret nothing.

** Chapter Five **

Steve slept the entire afternoon and well into the evening, leaving Bucky feeling twitchy. He felt like he had a million questions to ask of their counterparts but that none of them would be answered until Steve was awake. He had another million questions for Steve himself.

They’d had a quiet afternoon just hanging out at the house. Sam had answered a lot of questions about his life, chatting easily with the older men as he told stories about his time in the Air Force. Bucky had stayed quiet and listened whilst at the same time staring down the hallway that led to Steve’s room trying to will him to appear. Now he could hear Sam and his own counterpart talking in the kitchen, trying to keep their voices low but apparently unaware of his supersoldier hearing.

“-like a spare part.”

“You’re not a spare part Sam, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“I gotta talk to Steve, but then I don’t want to be in the way. They need time and space and to figure shit out, and I want to make sure they’re both _okay_ , y’know? He didn’t sleep at the hotel, and he’s not been eating much either if his metabolism is anything like Steve’s.”

“Well if he realises you’re babysitting him he won’t appreciate it. Not if he’s anything like me anyway. I think he’s functioning fine to look after his basic needs. He’ll eat when he’s hungry, and he’ll sleep when he gets tired enough,” he heard his counterpart respond and he could practically hear him shrugging as he said it. His stomach twisted unpleasantly at hearing Sam suggest that he didn’t think he could take care of himself properly. He was much better at listening to his basic needs now, his time in Wakanda had really helped with that, but the last few days had been strange and if he was being honest with himself perhaps he hadn’t taken as much care as he knew he really should have. He appreciated Sam’s care, the same as he appreciated his counterpart insisting he was an adult and capable of taking care of his own needs.

“I’m not _babysitting_ I just… it feels like the right thing to do, to make sure that both he and Steve are ok before I go anywhere.”

Their hushed conversation was interrupted by the doorbell ringing.

“Damn, that was fast,” older-Steve muttered, starting to slowly rise from where he was seated on the couch.

“That’s what she said!” quipped Bucky’s counterpart as he and Sam came back into the room with a pile of paper napkins and drinks for everyone.

Older-Steve rolled his eyes and made for the door, returning a few moments later with a tower of pizza boxes.

“Not sure what everybody liked so,” older-Bucky shrugged as Steve set all the boxes out on their table, starting to peek open the lids to find his favourite.

Bucky stood back as this was going on, the delicious smell of the pizzas making him realise again how hungry he really was. He felt bad that he was worrying Sam, so he resolved to eat as much as he could. It wasn’t a conscious decision to _not_ eat properly, but his appetite hadn’t been brilliant since reappearing in Wakanda and especially since Tony’s funeral. He assumed survivors guilt was a part of what he was feeling, that he’d made it when Tony hadn’t, as well as just a general feeling of being lost once again having involuntarily lurched even further into the future.

Sam cheerfully opened lids and read out topping options to Bucky who just stood there a little confused.

“Uh… there’s so many,” he responded uneasily when Sam looked at him for an answer of which one he wanted to try first.

“Start with the basics and work your way around, avoid anything with barbecue base because that’s a _crime_ , and the jury’s out on pineapple. But here, pepperoni,” Sam offered the box and Bucky picked up a slice.

“Hey I wonder if we like the same things? Seeing as how we’re the same person and all,” Bucky’s counterpart mused, looking around the three other men before looking through the pizza boxes.

“I mean, sausage is my favourite. What do you say, do you like yourself some uh… _sausage_ too?” he asked and Sam choked on his mouthful of pizza. Steve paused mid-chew on his own mouthful and gave his husband a _look_.

“Oh jeez Stevie, I meant on _pizza._ Get your mind outta the gutter, sheesh,” he chuckled and winked at his younger counterpart leading him to believe he definitely _hadn’t_ been talking about pizza toppings before plating himself up about five slices of different pizzas and retreating to his armchair with them.

Under Sam’s scrutiny Bucky picked up a few slices of pizza at random, biting into one and almost moaning in pleasure as the delicious taste burst across his tongue. Sam smirking at him told him maybe he wasn’t being as subtle as he thought about how much he was enjoying it. He decided to pay no attention to Sam and to focus on methodically trying all the different types of pizza so he plated himself up a selection and took them back to where he’d been sitting and ate every single crumb.

The next time he did look at Sam was as he took another slice of pineapple from the box on the table and glanced over to see Sam shaking his head.

“It’s good!” he protested and Sam just shook his head more, his frown deepening.

“That’s the kind of shit Barton would eat. I thought you were better than that, man,” he said in a disapproving tone that made Bucky kind of want to smirk at him.

“Don’t listen to him Buck,” came a voice from behind Bucky and he felt like he almost had a heart attack as he turned to see _his_ Steve standing behind him leaning against the wall, clearly mostly recovered from his cryo-sickness.

“Did you- you all know he was there?” Bucky demanded, pressing his right hand to his chest over his rapidly pounding heart as the other men laughed. He turned back to Steve who was smiling warmly, though he still looked a little peaky.

“Yeah. Hate to tell you buddy but your supersoldier reflexes aren’t good for shit when you’re distracted by pizza,” Steve’s counterpart pointed out and Bucky rolled his eyes, slugging the younger Steve on the arm with a grateful realisation that if Steve felt comfortable enough to sneak up on him, he obviously wasn’t still concerned about accidentally getting murdered for his trouble. He retreated with more pizza, taking the whole rest of the pineapple box and sitting right in front of Sam to eat it whilst making intense eye-contact with him whenever Sam looked his way.

He also kept an eye on Steve and though he didn’t eat much he managed a couple of slices before he yawned widely and caught Bucky’s eye.

“You feelin’ alright there?” Bucky’s counterpart asked and Steve nodded.

“Yeah. Just kinda drained still, but a lot better. Do you mind if I take a shower?” Steve asked and the older man grinned.

“Yeah Steve you _reek_. Towels in the closet opposite the bathroom, hot water should be all full, there’s about five different kinds of shower gel, go nuts.”

Steve thanked him and with what Bucky was sure was a lingering look in his direction, left the living room again and headed back down the hallway to the bathroom.

“I don’t remember you ever bein’ so polite. What, he get all the manners?” older-Bucky chastised his husband.

“Well he’s a guest in our home, least one of our guests has some manners huh?” older-Steve hinted, looking at Bucky and Sam now.

“Dishes guys, he means it’s your turn to do dishes,” Bucky’s counterpart warned and Sam looked affronted.

“I was gonna offer!” he defended and both older men laughed.

“We’re pulling your leg Sam, just load up the dishwasher,” older-Steve smirked and Sam mock-glared.

“Or leave em’ out, Alpine will lick them all clean. Swear that cat thinks she’s a dog…” Bucky’s counterpart grumbled, setting his empty plate aside.

Bucky and Sam took the hint and did collect up all the plates and glasses from their meal, taking them over to the kitchen and rinsing them off before loading up the dishwasher, packing up the pizza leftovers and putting them in the fridge and recycling all the empty boxes. Bucky couldn’t help but notice there were several notes all over the room in what looked to be Steve’s handwriting, all reminders of the date they needed to remember to travel to where Bruce had rebuilt the platform allowing Steve to go back in time to return the stones. Some were taped to the cabinet fronts, one was taped onto their wall planner, and another fixed to a pin-board full of photos and what looked to be ticket stubs.

“Huh, he really left them enough notes of the date, right?” Sam pointed out with a chuckle. Bucky nodded in agreement but then something else caught his eye. A framed photograph of his counterpart and Steve’s at the Grand Canyon. They looked to be right on the edge of the Canyon. Bucky was looking off into the distance and Steve was looking at him, smiling tenderly with an easy arm thrown around his shoulders. They were young in the photograph, maybe no older than he and Steve were now (however old they even were, as Bucky had no real idea at this point) and they just looked so happy. Bucky wondered who had taken the photograph.

It took Bucky a few seconds to realise the sound he could hear was Sam talking to him and that he’d completely zoned out.

“Huh? Sorry Sam, I was uh…” he trailed off lamely and Sam nodded with understanding.

“It’s ok. I was saying that’s a real nice picture. Have you ever seen the Grand Canyon?” he asked and Bucky thought hard for a second.

“No. I uh… I don’t think so… not that I remember. Pretty sure no, I mean, sightseeing trips weren’t really on Hydra’s agenda for me,” he shrugged, keeping his tone light. Sam nodded in understanding.

“You should go. You and Steve. Take a trip, take some time together and y’know, reconnect,” he said vaguely and Bucky smirked.

“ _Reconnect_ huh? Is that what guys call it these days?” Bucky asked and Sam held up his hands as if in surrender, but he was smirking.

“Nah, man, I don’t know what you think I’m tryna imply but-“

“You’re trying to set me and Steve up. To be… to be like this me and Steve?” Bucky asked, gesturing at the pinboard full of photos of a whole life together.

“I want you both to be happy, that’s all,” Sam said with genuine sincerity and Bucky leant back against the countertop, half staring at the selection of photographs and half spacing out.

_Happy._

It had been a very long time since he’d dared think about what that would look like for him.

“I don’t know what I want. I mean, I think… I remember- before… I wanted but we never,” Bucky tried to explain and Sam nodded in understanding.

“And nobody is gonna make you decide anything in any kind of hurry, least of all Steve. You’ve got all the time in the world to figure out what you want and what makes you happy because you _deserve_ to be happy,” Sam said sincerely before leaving Bucky alone to think for a few minutes.

His eyes skimmed over the pin-board again and the photos there and he moves closer to look at them in more detail. Him and Steve at the pyramids, him and Steve in front of a really old looking building that could be a temple with the sun rising behind it, him and Steve somewhere in the snow with hundreds of little bright coloured flags draped over the rocks they’re standing on, him and Steve on the Great Wall of China, on a perfect white beach, in the middle of a red desert, covered in mud, covered in paint, dressed in suits, dressed in scuba wetsuits, all over the world doing all kinds of things - glimpses of two full lives of experiences and memories.

Bucky knows that he’s travelled. He has memories of places that he knows his body has been but not really his mind, he had been freshly wiped by Hydra and struggled to form memories so soon after coming out of cryo and the mind-wipe but he sometimes has glimpses of places he’s been but none are like those in this Bucky and Steve’s pictures. It makes him want these things for himself, to make his own memories like this which are equally as bright and vibrant, full of colours and laughter and sunshine. The only memories he possesses which are so bright are those from his time in Wakanda and the few tiny scraps he’d managed to hold onto from before Hydra - a few seconds of his sisters laugh and her grinning face, little Steve protesting as Bucky mopped his sweaty brow through another fever, huddling in an abandoned barn in France playing cards with Morita and Dugan and losing his last pair of dry socks to one of them, cursing them both out for it as they laughed heartily.

“You alright out here kid?” his counterpart ducked his head round the corner into the kitchen and Bucky startled away from the pictures, feeling like he was somehow violating their privacy by looking at them.

“You’re allowed to look; they’re on the wall for anybody to see,” said the older man, as if sensing his discomfort.

“I uh… you guys have been a lot of places,” Bucky replied weakly and his counterpart nodded.

“Yeah we sure have. It’s a really big interesting world out there, so many amazing things to experience. That reminds me!” he hurried to a drawer in the bottom of one of the kitchen units and shoved aside a few things in the way of whatever he was looking for before extracting a small notebook with a triumphant sound.

“I made this for you, for when we finally got to meet. Think of it as like… a cheat sheet,” he grinned, handing over the notebook.

Scrawled on the cover was a single line of text.

_Bucky’s guide to the big wide world_

He hesitated for a moment before his counterpart nodded to him and made an encouraging hand gesture. He opened it somewhere in the middle, landing on ‘N’ in the alphabet and finding a small section of handwritten text with a photo below.

_N – Nepal – Never felt so small in my life next to those mountains. Food is amazing, people even better – so kind and friendly. Take really warm socks and an extra jacket and always drink the lemon tea when it gets offered (mint not as good). You don’t get sick from altitude but normies won’t like it if you tell them that, so pretend to be slowed down at least little._

Glued to the page is a dog-eared picture of Bucky’s counterpart in a large puffy coat and backpack, sporting a thick beard, woolly hat and wide grin, holding up an ice-axe in his right hand.

“Never managed to get a summit on Everest but I did some of the other ones nearby,” the older-man explained and Bucky continued to stare at the photograph.

He turned back a chunk of pages and landed on G.

_G – Galapagos Islands – Unbelievable, like seriously, how is this place even real?! Also, go snorkelling, a sea turtle bit Steve on the ass and I almost drowned laughing at him._

He could feel his counterparts’ eyes on him and he looked up to find the older man looking expectant.

“I didn’t make this to show off to you what I’ve done with my life that you haven’t, I made it to save you a bit of time when you decide what you want to do and y’know, just some insider knowledge and tips and tricks about places and things, and some of my stories too I guess. Just some places I’ve been, stuff I’ve done, cool stuff in the world that you might enjoy, places you can go make your own memories,” he said and Bucky nodded, swallowing around the uncomfortable lump in his throat. This notebook must have taken years to piece together. He skimmed a few more pages and as he suspected his counterpart seemed to vary in age a fair bit as he jumped from picture to picture.

“Thanks. I… I really don’t know what to say,” Bucky admitted finally, barely above a whisper. His counterpart nodded, looking at him seriously for a moment before he yawned widely.

“I’m gonna go sit, been a long couple days,” he excused himself from the kitchen and left Bucky alone with his thoughts and the notebook.

Not every page was a place, some were foods he had strong opinions on, both positive and negative, and general things like brands of car ‘ _Ford – Don’t buy one of these unless you want to learn to fix your own damn car every five minutes. 1980, maybe they’re better in the future?’_ and random bits of information such as _‘International Space Station – There’s a website that tells you when you can see it fly over your house, it’s like real-life sci-fi’._

He lost track of time looking through the book standing there leaning against the counter. It was so thoughtful, full of recommendations of places and things he might like and things he may want to do, as well as things he may want to avoid, even going so far as to thoughtfully identify places that Bucky’s counterpart suspected the Winter Soldier could have been and that he may wish to avoid in case they brought back bad memories, marked with a small ‘WS?’ in the bottom right corner of any applicable page. He skipped the pages with the initialled corners, not wanting to get dragged into any patchy memories and risk losing time, especially when the rest of the book was so fascinating. It looked like his counterpart had lived a hell of a life and once he got over the initial pang of jealousy, it made him feel quite determined to get out and see the world for himself and make the most of his second chance. Hydra may have taken some years off him, he wasn’t sure how many for certain, but he wasn’t going to let them take any more by wallowing in sadness or self-pity of what they’d done or made him do. As much as the thought of it scared him at least a bit, he knew he really wanted to make the most of this opportunity.

He didn’t even really notice it had got dark, his night vision good enough that it didn’t interrupt his reading. Only when Steve wandered into the now dark kitchen a while later and flicked on the light did he realise how long he’d been standing there.

“Hey Buck,” he offered quietly and Bucky looked up.

He looked better again than he had earlier when he’d reappeared in the lounge.

“Hey,” he responded, closing the book and setting it down.

“Everyone else has hit the hay, thought I’d come check on you.”

Bucky glanced at the clock, noting it was nearly eleven so not particularly late.

“Even Wilson?”

“ _Especially_ Wilson, the guy is a grandma with his bedtime,” Steve chuckled and Bucky gave a small smile in response.

They were both silent for a few moments and Bucky could practically see the cogs turning in Steve’s brain as he tried to think of what to say next.

“Listen, I know this must be kinda weird for you. I mean, when I woke up… after I went in the first time, it was weird for me to see us, them, like this, all… y’know,” Steve made a vague hand gesture and Bucky just looked at him.

“Old and married?” he suggested and Steve nodded.

“Yeah, that. I don’t… uh,” Steve paused and scratched the back of his head, a pink flush creeping into his cheeks. “I don’t want you to think I’m expecting anything of you. We’re different people to them, y’know? I’m just real glad you’re here, and that I’m here and that we’re both relatively okay,” he finished and Bucky looked at him. It seemed the longer he stared at him the redder Steve’s face became.

“When did you go in? The first time?” he asked, deciding that was an easier question than asking when their counterparts had become romantically involved.

“Maybe bout seven, eight months after we got Bucky, y’know, other Bucky, from the train. He got a bad infection and needed surgery on his arm to clean it up and close the wound because his serum wasn’t really active yet at that point. Everything was a mess after the war and we were trying to keep a low profile too so it wasn’t easy. But once he got better and we got the cryo-tank from Hydra and got them settled living somewhere under decent cover, I went in. They got me out again a few years later, maybe it was around 50’, 51’? They were worried I’d died in there so they got me out just to check,” he said with a small exasperated smile, shaking his head fondly.

“Then once we got as far as the seventies I planned to get to Hank Pym to get some more Pym particles for my device so I could come right back to where I was meant to reappear on the platform, but when they woke me up the date I’d asked so I could go to Pym they told me they _lost_ the thing when they moved house at some point. I don’t actually believe that’s true, I think the other you broke it messing with it or something. But anyway, I had to go back in until now,” he finished explaining and Bucky nodded.

“I’m sorry if you thought that I left. That wasn’t my intention, in case that’s how it came across when you saw the other me,” Steve added quickly, looking guilty now.

“I wanted you to come get me yourself so you could see it was genuine and that I’d-“

“That you’d done something really dumb?” Bucky finished for him.

“Buck, I-“

“Listen Steve. I don’t know what I can really tell you. I’ve got to know him over the last couple of days and I can tell you I am definitely not the guy the other you is with, so if that’s what you want then I’m really sorry but I’m just not him. I’m sorry you waited so many years in the ice, and I’m sorry that you risked your life for me again. Maybe it’s better if I just go back to Wakanda,” he said quietly. Steve’s face didn’t betray his emotions but his shoulders squared a little, like he was looking for an argument.

“Did you ever think that maybe I don’t _want_ a different version of you? That I don’t want him or any other idealised version of Bucky Barnes? I’m not the same Steve Rogers from before all of this either, I’ve… I’ve changed too and I’ve been through things. Nothing like as bad as you but the things I’ve experienced have changed me and I’m not Steve Rogers from nineteen forty-five anymore,” Steve protested, starting to pace the length of the kitchen.

“Don’t belittle what you’ve been through Steve. Half the world was gone, for _five years_. That must have been some kind of hell,” Bucky spoke quietly and Steve nodded solemnly before he continued.

“What happened to you in the past is more horrible than I can even bear to think about and I know I probably don’t even know the half of it because all I know is what’s in the files. What I _do_ know is that despite all of that you’re still Bucky Barnes. You’ve got the same voice, the same eyes, the same lips and that damn dimple in your chin… you’ve got the same personality underneath… I mean maybe you’re a little quieter now but you’re still kind, still a guy who looks out for his friends, still got that smart mouth and dirty sense of humour, still the strongest person I ever knew, moreso than ever now. You’re unbreakable, Buck, and you inspire me so damn much. If you want to go back to Wakanda because that’s what you genuinely want from your life now then you should do it, and I’ll be happy for you. I just want you to be free, healthy and happy, because you deserve it. You’ve got another shot to have a life of your own now, and I’d fight Thanos all over again if I had to for you to have that,” Steve finished and stopped his pacing right before Bucky, reaching out and setting his hand on Bucky’s right shoulder.

“You a _re_ free now, you can do anything you want,” he reiterated, his hand a warm grounding point against Bucky’s body, Steve’s body heat warming him even through the fabric of his shirt.

“I… I don’t know what I want, not really. I couldn’t make choices or I wasn’t… I wasn’t allowed to want things for myself… I haven’t had that back for very long, and it’s still kind of unfamiliar. There’s so much to decide and it’s a little overwhelming,” Bucky admitted and he saw the flicker of what looked like sadness in Steve’s eyes and felt Steve’s hand shift slightly on his shoulder, the pressure there getting less as if he was about to lift it away.

“-Except,” Bucky started quickly, not wanting Steve’s hand to go.

“Except I know I want it to involve you. Whatever my new life in the future looks like, I don’t really see it without you in it. I… everything was… I really thought I was gone. Those tiny moments of clarity I’d get sometimes before they put me back in the freezer when I knew for a second that I was a person… I- I almost gave up. You pulled me out of that dark and I… you’re… you’re like the sun. I don’t know how I’d ever live without you,” Bucky’s voice cracked and it took every scrap of his willpower to force down the tears he could feel burning at his eyes. He cleared his throat and spoke again to break the tension hanging heavy in the air at his declaration.

“I’d also really like it if we could like… have a target of maybe neither of us dies, gets captured, gets turned to dust, sent into the past, or frozen for like… can we set a goal of at least a year to start with? Then extend it if we make it that far?” he offered and Steve’s eyes crinkled in the corners as he smiled wide, his whole face bursting into a grin.

“Yeah, I like that plan. And just so you know I think… I know you won’t agree, but I think maybe you were the one who saved me, not the other way around. I didn’t belong here in this future until I knew you were here too Buck, not really. I could get by… but it wasn’t home.”

They stand there silently for a few moments, Steve’s hand still on Bucky’s shoulder and their eyes locked as if they are both waiting for the other to make the first move. Bucky allowed his focus to shift from Steve’s eyes to his mouth for just a fraction of a second, taking in the plush pink lips and wondering what it would feel like if he moved forwards and closed the gap between them at long last.

“Just kiss already! Sheesh,” came an abrupt voice from the living room and they both startled. They took a few steps so they could see the doorway and found Bucky’s counterpart there in pyjamas, leaning on his cane again and Sam stood behind him looking guilty.

“He came to make cocoa, _apparently_. I tried to stop him coming in there and interrupting, we definitely weren’t deliberately eavesdropping,” Sam hurried out and Bucky and Steve smirked at each other, knowing they’ve caught the two men red handed.

Bucky realises he doesn’t know where he’s meant to be sleeping that night but Sam seems to read his mind.

“I’m taking the couch, still never sharing a bed with you again Steve,” he called after their retreating backs as Steve and Bucky left the kitchen.

“What happened?”

“When we were looking for you sometimes places only had one bed, no big deal, we’d share. But _apparently_ I steal all the blankets, but there’s no actual evidence for this accusation,” Steve smirked and Bucky nodded, a distant part of him remembering that yes, Steve did steal all the blankets but he needed them because he was smaller.

There was indeed a pillow and a pile of blankets on the couch as they passed by heading to the bedroom Steve had napped in earlier.

“You don’t have to share the bed with me. Like I said there’s no pressure, I can take the floor or-“

“Steve?” Bucky interrupted as Steve opened the door.

“Yeah?”

“If you’re gonna let me make decisions for myself now you need to let me make them. I’m second guessing myself enough without you doing it for me too,” he said gently and Steve turned, Bucky pushing the door closed behind them.

“Sure, absolutely,” he said with a small hint of a smile.

“One last thing though, Sam said you didn’t have any pyjamas so I borrowed you a set from Rogers. Hope that’s okay and hopefully they fit,” Steve said, tossing Bucky a pair of soft flannel pyjama pants and a plain maroon coloured tee shirt. He caught them easily and traced his right thumb across the fabric as he held it in his hands. The clothes felt soft and warm and like they would be extremely comfortable to sleep in.

“Thanks. I only uh, have these right now,” he said awkwardly, gesturing at his clothing.

“Yeah, Sam said. We can go into town tomorrow and you can pick up some spares somewhere. Or I have a couple things here you could borrow,” Steve offered and Bucky nodded.

“I’m gonna go brush my teeth, I’ll be right back.”

Bucky exhaled heavily as soon as Steve left the room. He took just a second to collect his thoughts and then wrenched off his jeans and shirt, picking up the pyjama pants and considering for a moment. He pulled them on, followed by the soft tee-shirt and then bundled up his clothing and threw it into the corner.

He stood stock still for a moment in the middle of the room, his brain buzzing as he tried to collect his thoughts.

He was alive. He was free. He was with Steve who had just confirmed he reciprocated Bucky’s feelings.

Before he could hesitate a moment longer he forced himself to open the door and pad silently into the hallway, the bathroom door was ajar and he could hear the water running. He rounded the corner as Steve was shutting off the faucet and just turning to leave the bathroom. Silencing a final whisper of doubt from the dark corners of his mind he reached out, his right hand finding the side of Steve’s face and his left bunching in the other man’s shirt at his side and he pulled Steve to him as he took the final step forward, crushing their mouths together.

Steve made a startled sound and the taste of mint flooded Bucky’s senses. For a brief second his tongue was in Steve’s mouth and then Steve’s was in his and then it was over.

He pulled back. Steve’s mouth was wet and looked redder than ever and he looked so shocked it would have been funny if Bucky wasn’t so terrified he’d somehow misunderstood Steve earlier.

“Sorry I… I didn’t-“Bucky started, moving to release his hands from the other man, his heart starting to race. He was halted by Steve moving forwards and pressing their lips together again, this time with a bit more finesse.

Bucky wasn’t sure if the whimper he heard came from himself or Steve as their tongues met again, twisting together and tasting until they parted to breathe properly. His hands had found their way into Steve’s hair which was now a ruffled mess and he could tell his own face was burning hot.

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve whispered longingly, pulling him forward again into another dizzying kiss. Bucky found himself backed against the door, the latch clicking closed behind him. He reached down behind himself and fumbled with the lock until he heard that click too.

“Steve… I- I _want_ ,” he forced out, barely recognising his own voice as it came out breathless and ragged.

“Me too.”

It took him a second to realise Steve had pinned him to the back of the door and he didn’t feel threatened in any way, Steve’s arms bracketing him in making him only feel safe and not confined.

He could feel himself getting hard and he knew Steve must be able to feel it too with the way their bodies were pressed together. Sure enough Steve cocked his eyebrow and smirked and Bucky rolled his eyes fondly, the response came so naturally to him it was almost like interacting with Steve was pure muscle memory, even if this part of their interaction was new.

The next thing he knew their mouths were connected again and Steve’s hands were steering him away from the door and shifting him so his lower back was pressed against the vanity. Various items which were left balanced beside the sink clattered to the floor as Steve lifted Bucky as if he weighed nothing, placing him sat on the countertop balanced in front of the sink.

“Steve – what-“he panted out between frantic kisses, sending a bottle of mouthwash flying as his hands scrabbled for purchase on the smooth counter. He was trying very hard not to grab the faucet and no doubt snap the thing off and cause a huge water leak.

“Can I- can I touch you?” Steve breathed against his lips and Bucky moved slightly back. Steve’s eyes were dark with arousal, pupils blown and expression hungry. He nodded and let his head drop back against the cabinet on the wall behind him as Steve’s hand immediately closed around his cock through the soft fabric of the borrowed pyjamas.

Steve’s other hand had found its way into his hair and was holding it gently back off his face and neck as he kissed a line from his ear lobe down to where his neck met his shoulder. Bucky’s own hands, flesh and vibranium alike, roamed Steve’s body as he used his core strength to hold himself steady on the countertop. Their lips met again and he whimpered into Steve’s mouth as the hand touching him through his clothing worked its way under the waistband and touched his skin. Steve’s hand was warm and calloused and seemed to know how to touch him just right.

He closed his eyes and tried to keep his breathing steady between frantic kisses as Steve began to stroke him with a sure grip, his thumb swiping over the head every so often and causing his toes to curl and his breath to hitch. His own right hand had found a handful of Steve’s ass and he relaxed his grip a little as he became aware just how tightly he was holding the pert muscle, his left was playing with Steve’s chest, enjoying the breathy sounds he could just about hear escape Steve’s lips when his thumb caught his nipple through the thin tee he was wearing ready for bed.

Steve’s hand stopped moving and he moved back slightly, tugging at the waistband of Bucky’s sleep pants as if asking permission. Their eyes met and Steve looked serious, questioning. In lieu of answering verbally he reluctantly let go of Steve’s body and pulled the pants off himself along with his boxer-briefs, they both got stuck tangled around his right foot but he didn’t care enough to kick them off fully if it meant one more second without Steve touching him.

Steve dropped to a low crouch in front of where he was still balanced on the countertop, trying his best not to let his ass drop into the sink behind him. It was made much more difficult to concentrate on holding himself balanced when the other man looked up through his ridiculously long eyelashes, his hand settling back on Bucky’s cock and he leant forward, his mouth only a few inches away before he stopped.

“Is this okay?” he asked in a low voice.

Bucky nodded, his right hand settling on cupping Steve’s jaw and cheek as he moved forwards slowly, opening his mouth and letting his tongue dart over the tip. Bucky jerked at the sensation of the warm, soft tongue and Steve’s eyes crinkled in the corners in a smile as he opened his mouth and slowly, slowly sank down to about half way.

The counter made an ominous crunching sound under his left hand as Bucky gripped it with more force than he really intended, all breath leaving his body and all thoughts leaving his brain that didn’t involve the slick heat of Steve’s mouth as he started to bob up and down. Bucky kept his hand on Steve’s cheek and Steve tilted his head slightly, letting him feel his own length through his cheek and causing him to let a small moan escape his lips. Steve looked up at him and he bit his lip, trying to keep quiet.

He managed to stay quiet for a few more moments until Steve opened his mouth wider still and sank all the way down to the root. Bucky felt his mouth drop open as he hit the back of Steve’s throat, a guttural groan wrenching from him before he could do anything to control it. His right hand automatically grabbed a handful of Steve’s hair and his hips canted forwards. If this bothered Steve at all he didn’t show it as he continued with his ministrations, swallowing around him and making his eyes roll into the back of his head.

“Steve- _fuck_. Steve you’re gonna choke,” he attempted half-heartedly to pull the other man back.

Slowly, Steve drew off him. He looked absolutely w _recked_ as he looked up with a smirk, he had drool all over his chin and his cheeks were red, eyes dark and lips swollen and shiny.

“I have no gag reflex and I can hold my breath for nearly an hour so try me,” he chuckled softly, voice rough. He barely gave Bucky a second before he swallowed him down again, swirling his tongue around the head, sucking him down to the root, not giving him a second to recover or to anticipate what was going to happen next.

Bucky did his best to keep as quiet as possible as his vision slowly started to white out, pleasure completely overcoming his senses and drowning everything else out.

“S- oh, Steve, I’m g-gonna-“ he gasped out, tugging at Steve’s hair in warning. Steve just looked up at him, his eyes dark and smouldering as he continued as if Bucky hadn’t just warned him.

“ _Steve-_ I, oh… “Bucky gasped out, biting on his hand to keep himself as quiet as he could as he hit his climax. The world fell away completely as his vision went blank and there was a roaring of white noise in his ears, drowning out his own racing heartbeat, wave after wave of pleasure crashing over him as he tried to keep quiet, not fall off the countertop and not grab Steve tightly enough to hurt him.

He was aware enough to watch Steve swallowing, lapping softly at his spent cock which remained stubbornly at least half-hard until he whimpered with oversensitivity and the other man relented.

“Where- where did you learn to do that?” Bucky panted, trying to catch his breath and pushing his hair back off his sweaty face. A few girls had gone down on him before the war, he remembered it, but he remembered it being a lot more gentle and teasing, certainly nothing like this.

“Internet, super helpful,” Steve grinned, licking his lips obscenely and getting to his feet to stand in front of Bucky. He seized the front of Steve’s shirt and pulled him in for a kiss, groaning softly at the taste of himself on Steve’s tongue and wrapping his legs around Steve’s, heels digging into the backs of his thighs, pulling him in closer.

“You gotta let me-“Bucky started but trailed off when he realised Steve was pressed up against his thigh but he wasn’t hard.

“I uh… I think maybe from being in cryo? I can’t uh… not right now anyway. Sorry Buck,” Steve trailed off, cheeks flaming red with embarrassment.

“I can owe you for tomorrow?” Bucky offered and Steve grinned.

“Yeah, I like that plan. Wanna go to bed?”

“Yeah, feel like I could sleep for a week now,” Bucky sighed contentedly, sliding off the countertop and putting his weight back on his slightly shaky legs. He pulled the borrowed pyjama pants back up and tucked his still hopeful half-hard cock away, Steve smirking at him the whole time as he quickly mumbled an excuse about the serum to which Steve gave a knowing nod.

They picked up all the items that had scattered off the counter and brushed their teeth side by side. Bucky knew Steve caught him staring at him in the mirror at least a few times, but he was beyond caring about that now. Steve opened the door silently and peeked out into the hallway, giving the all clear before creeping from the bathroom back to the bedroom. Bucky switched off the light and followed him a few seconds later. Steve let Bucky pick which side of the bed he wanted first (the right, so he could lay on his back or right side), then crawled in beside him, spooning up close and pressing his warm chest against Bucky’s back, burying his nose in his neck and wrapping him tightly in his arms.

“My brain is actually quiet,” Bucky whispered after a few moments of adjusting to being the small spoon for the first time in his life and just listening to Steve breathe.

“Mmm, mine too, maybe we’ll have to do that every night before bed,” Steve mumbled back, sounding sleepy.

“I wouldn’t complain,” Bucky grinned, twisting in Steve’s arms to place a kiss on any part of his face he could reach, which turned out to be the end of his nose.

“G’night Buck. Glad you’re here.”

“Glad you’re here too Stevie,” he whispered, closing his eyes and letting the steady rise and fall of Steve’s chest against his back lull him to sleep.

*~*~*~*~*

When Bucky woke the room was light, sunlight creeping in around the edges of the curtains. Steve was gone but the space beside him was still faintly warm, so he hadn’t been gone for long.

He lay there for a few moments before deciding he could definitely hear some kind of raised voices from the living room so he sat up and listened more closely.

“ _Oh that is it!”_ Sam cried angrily, there was a laugh in response which sounded like his older self, it definitely wasn’t Steve.

There was a few words that were too unclear to make out and then-

“ _Eat my ass, old man!”_ Sam yelled triumphantly. This was followed by the sound of protesting and then footsteps approaching the door. Steve opened it quietly and crept in, grinning shyly when he saw Bucky was awake and closing the door behind himself. He was still in his sleepwear and he looked a little dishevelled, hair a mess and a pillow crease on one side of his face.

“Sorry, they’re playing Mario Kart. I have coffee?” he offered, holding up a hand with two mugs hooked carefully onto one large finger, one with a picture of the ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign on it, the other patterned with garish cartoon kittens.

Bucky accepted the kitten mug and Steve gave him another huge smile.

“Great choice. All of their mugs are like this, there’s not a damn normal thing in this house,” he laughed, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“I guess it’s all normal for them right?” Bucky said, inclining his head at the hideous kittens on the mug.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Normal is subjective,” Steve nodded, picking his legs up into the bed too and twisting his body so he was leaning back against the headboard beside Bucky. He turned his head and Bucky stubbornly kept his own eyes forward until he couldn’t keep a straight face anymore, the laugh bubbling out of him unexpectedly, feeling strange in one way but natural in another. He relented and turned to face Steve who smiled at him, lifting one hand to push Bucky’s hair back off his face for him.

“Morning Buck,” he grinned, leaning forwards and pressing his lips to Bucky’s.

The kiss was totally different to the night before. It was soft and tender and slow, the exact opposite of their lust-driven encounter in the bathroom that Bucky hardly dared believe was real. Steve tasted like coffee and something sweet that Bucky couldn’t place.

“Feel like I’ve waited a hundred years to have a morning like this,” Steve grinned even wider as they separated and Bucky felt his cheeks growing warm.

“Well… you kinda did?” he pointed out and Steve took a sip of his coffee, looking thoughtful.

“I guess you’re right,” he agreed with a shrug.

“ _Oh come on! Fuck you!_ ” Sam’s indignant voice carried through from the living room and they both smirked.

“Sam bad at this game or is he just really good at this game?” Bucky asked and Steve mulled it over for a second.

“I think maybe a combination of both? It would probably make him even angrier if we went out there and beat him too.”

“Will I be able to?” Bucky asked, taking a sip of his coffee and sighing in contentment at how good it tasted.

“Oh yeah it’s not difficult, just drive a little character in a little kart. My favourite is the little green dinosaur,” Steve explained, his eyes crinkling up again in the corners as he smiled. Bucky decided those little smile lines and getting to see them appear at something he said or as Steve excitedly explained something were his favourite change on Steve in the future.

“Green dinosaur, right, I think I can do that. Can we cuddle first?”

“We can absolutely cuddle first,” Steve grinned, setting his coffee down on the nightstand as Bucky did the same with his own, worming his left arm under Steve’s neck and pulling him as close as he physically could with his right arm, Steve burrowing his face into his neck and wrapping his own arms around him in return.

Beating Sam at Mario Kart might have to wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All feedback welcomed and gratefully received. I haven't written in this fandom before (though I have read it for a few years) so I do really appreciate any comments and kudos. 
> 
> Oh and in case anybody is interested, this is the website that older-Bucky is talking about in the notebook; https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ it works worldwide and is extremely cool if you're a huge space dork like me!


End file.
